by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
If you have driven down South 3rd Street in front of South Beach Regional Shopping Center in the past few months, you couldn’t have missed the huge Keller Williams Atlantic Partners sign announcing their new office and rising agent count.
“It was just a way for us to get our name out there and let everyone know we were coming,” said Margaret Sherrill, team leader for Keller Williams Atlantic Partners. “It was a fun idea and you wouldn’t believe the attention that it got. People would come up to me all the time and say that they were watching that sign to see what our count was up to. It was a very effective way to get our name out there.”
When the “sign police” made them take down the sign, their count had reached 60 agents.
“Keller Williams has over 600 offices across the United States,” said Steven Tufts, operating partner. “Most of our offices are very large offices as far as agent count goes, over 100. Some of our offices have 200 or 300 agents in them.
“In Jacksonville, we didn’t have a very big presence. We had two relatively small offices (in terms of Keller Williams, one in Mandarin and one in Orange Park. When I say relatively small, I mean a few years ago they were less than 100 agents. When we began to grow, I think what our strategy was with the sign was to tell the world that this is not a little tiny local company that popped up out of the ground.
“If you don’t know who Keller Williams is, then you should go look it up on the Internet.”
They had 43 agents when they first put the sign up. Every week it would go up one or two and now they are at 60.
“By the end of the year, we may go up to 65 - we’re not sure yet - but it will make us one of the top three offices in the Beaches area and we’ve only been open six or seven months,” said Tufts. “It was our way to say to the world, if you don’t know who Keller Williams Realty is, than you should go find out. And people did. They would call, watch the sign or we’d be out and about wearing our Keller Williams shirt and they would inquire about us. It became sort of a fun way to communicate who we were to the marketplace.”
Tufts has one home in Atlanta and one in Ponte Vedra Beach. He lives part-time in each, but his family is in Atlanta where he has a Keller Williams team, Tufts Realty Associates.
The company opened in May 2006 with the intention of moving into an office in the South Beach Regional Shopping Center but the buildout took longer than expected so they moved into a temporary space at 200 Executive Way.
“It was always our plan to move into the new space, but it was a pet store and a hair salon so we had to complete the build-out and it has been a longer process than we anticipated,” said Sherrill. “We just outgrew the temporary space so quickly that we just had to have a different space.”
When they realized the buildout of their space in the shopping center was going to take longer than expected, they moved again into another temporary space in the South Beach Professional Center off of Jacksonville Drive.
They now will move into their new 5,700 square foot space next to the old Hooters in the South Beach Regional Shopping Center and finally have a permanent home.
Their new office is also conveniently located just a few storefronts from the new Northeast Florida Association of Realtor’s Beaches Service Center and will also provide a large improvement in foot traffic.
“It’s a fabulous location,” said Sherrill. “First of all we have Bed Bed & Beyond, Stein Mart, Bealls and possibly a Home Depot going in there. From the standpoint of location, there is going to be a lot of traffic in and out of that shopping center and our building faces the back of J. Turner Butler Blvd, and we will have a big sign on the back of our building so when people drive down J. Turner Butler Blvd., the first thing they will see is a Keller Williams Realty sign.”
The new office has offices and cubicles for the agents to rent or use as needed. They also have a conference room and community space for the agents to work.
The offices surround around a large training room that will hold 50 plus people.
“The heart of the building is our centrally located training room,” said Tufts. “As far as technology, every office will have a data and a phone line and most offices will have two or three data and phone lines, so an agent can walk in there, plug in their laptop and go to work. We have a sales meeting once a week and our goal is to have one to two training classes everyday of the week.”