by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
After only five years in real estate in Jacksonville, Paul Gruenther of Vanguard Realty/GMAC has made a name for himself in the local real estate market. Not only for being a conscientious Realtor, but a good person.
Community service, whether it is building a ramp, fixing up a house or raising money for a charity by dressing up a as a calendar girl, Gruenther has first in line because he believes it is important. He says it’s ingrained in him and has been from a very young age.
“In my family, that was a principle,” said Gruenther. “You do things in community. My dad was a career military officer and my mom was a stay-at-home mom of six children. A lot of what my mother did was to volunteer in the community.”
He said even to this day, his mom volunteers at the Lightner Museum.
“She likes activity, being around people and giving back,” he said. “So, I learned that growing up.”
Gruenther said he doesn’t feel all that different than most Realtors. The spirit of the Realtor community is one of giving back. It’s a good quality to have to be a successful Realtor.
“We have to have empathy in this business,” he said. “If we are going to sell well in this business, then we have to have good customer service and be sincere about what we do.”
Gruenther feels that by doing community service a sort of a “Pay it Forward” effect could happen to our city.
“If we think about our community as Realtors and we think about what we are doing,” he said. “By improving the people in the low end of the community, we improve our whole city and improve the economic basis of the city. It benefits all of us to take an interest in the community with what little time we might have.
“We have 5,600 agents in the Northeast Florida Association of Realtors. If each agent decided that they would give an hour a year or even a half a day a year to helping the community, it would make a huge difference in our community. Our FCAT’s would improve in our schools, our economic base would improve, our base of employees would improve and we would all benefit from that.”
Thought it might make sense on a large scale, Gruenther said there is generally only about a five percent participation rate NEFAR members.
He said the NEFAR Beaches Council is a little more active, probably because they meet weekly and get the information out and get involved. He said he’d like to see all of NEFAR agents get involved more in community service and help improve the community to help themselves in the future.
Gruenther started in real estate five years ago with Watson and then moved over to Vanguard Realty/GMAC two and a half years ago.
His involvement in the real estate community has stretched far beyond contracts and open houses.
First he started by chairing the Beaches Council in 2005 and 2006, which is basically running the meetings and scheduling speakers.
Then he got involved in building ramps and a whole new interest evolved.
“Initially, I just went out on a ramp build,” said Gruenther. “But, then I thought, well, this is a fun thing to do. It’s beneficial and a feel good thing to do, so then I just started doing some ramps.”
He started by vice chairing (with Sandy Holdren of Realty Executives) NEFAR’s Community Affairs Committee, which oversaw the Ramp it Up! program in 2006 and then chairing it in 2007.
“Building a ramp in so productive,” said Gruenther. “When you get done at the end of the day you can see it and feel it. Then the person that was a prisoner in their house comes out and rolls down their ramp, it is so cool.”
This year, Gruenther has passed the torch of the Community Affairs Committee on to Chris Davis, formerly of Valley National Bank, but he is still heavily involved from the beaches area.
“Regularly, I take on a ramp build out here at the beach and I’ll recruit a team for the build,” said Gruenther. He was also involved this year in the Paint the Town event that happened last month.
Gruenther is also involved in the Women’s Council of Realtors, which led several months ago to him being asked to dress up in a garish burlesque outfit, dance around and entertain the guests at the annual WCR Fashion Show.
“That was a hoot,” he said. “If they would have asked me to do it by myself I would have said no, but since there were others doing it, too. It was so much fun. It was very tastefully done.”
His most recent outlandish act was the stand in front of a shopping center with a cardboard sign that read, “Realtor will work hard for your business,” handing out information sheets to interested parties.
“That was a wild hair,” he said. “I had been thinking about it for awhile. I came in here one morning for my meeting with the Beaches Business Association and I just made a commitment that I was going to do it. It was scary doing that because it was a weird thing to do. I’ll admit it.”
Eventually Gruenther’s antics were stopped by the police who kindly asked him to move along and he did.
“People either loved it or hated it,” he said. “The majority of people were like, I drove by you and I couldn’t believe it!”
Gruenther has also been on the board of directors of The Housing Partnership of Northeast Florida since 2007.
“Being on the board, I’m involved at a higher level with the Housing Partnership where we are setting strategy, doing oversight and reviewing financials,” he said. “Carolyn Ettlinger, president of the Housing Partnership, is retiring, so one of the things we are doing right now is examining the organization, doing a job description and helping with a search for a new president and working a transition to get a new person on board. That’s all being done by the board.”
Before real estate, Gruenther worked Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida for 11 years as an information and technology project manager, senior financial consultant and a planning and budget manager.
He has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Virginia Tech and a master’s in finance from the University of Hartford.
He left the corporate world and got into real estate because he was driven to do it.
“I took a severance package and it allowed me to springboard into something else and that was real estate,” he said. “I had already bought two real estate investment properties. When I got out of Blue Cross, I bought two more and over the next nine months I rehabilitated them and got them going as rentals and then studied for my real estate license. Then I went with Watson Realty.”