By Carole Hawkins, Staff Writer
Shopping should be fun.
So when the owners of The Legends of Real Estate East Coast designed their first sales office, they made it look like the kind of place you go to meet your best friend for an afternoon chat.
The company in April opened the doors of its new brokerage in Jacksonville Beach, with a storefront design that mixes the bistro feel of a Starbucks with the streamlined look of the Apple Store.
“We want an office that’s inviting to, not just the agents, but to our customers,” co-broker Millie Kanyar said. “When you look at where people are congregating today, where they tend to go and sit, it’s at places like Panera Bread. We want our customers to have that same kind of experience.”
At the front door there’s an indoor waterfall fountain where customers are greeted by a concierge who guides them to either plop into thick cushioned bucket seats in a lounge area or climb onto a stool at a coffee bar. There, they can plug in a laptop, connect to a WiFi network, and help themselves to an espresso, latte, juice or sparkling water. Or for privacy, there’s a glass walled area decorated as a comfy living room.
Every meeting space is populated by a wall-mounted wide screen, where agents can toggle between television, the Internet and the company network. Agents can show customers the MLS listing, market stats, or take a virtual walk through a neighborhood using Google Maps.
“It used to be, you’d pull up a property on a screen on your desktop, and there was like this wall between you and your customer,” Kanyar said. “Now it’s friendlier. You sit next to them. They love the big screen and they relax a little more.”
What the brokerage doesn’t have is dozens of private offices. There’s a board room and other team spaces, and that’s it.
“In a traditional model, everybody would just come in and go into their office,” Co-broker Audrey Lackie said. “Here, the coffee bar and the other spaces give agents the opportunity to share ideas with each other and they work more collaboratively.”
The agents are also saddled with fewer fees, said Lackie, giving them more individual control over their marketing dollars.
There’s a green room to take a photo for a web page, or to create a new video to upload to YouTube. And, Realtors are strongly encouraged to use social media in their marketing strategies.
“It enables the agent to have immediate access to their customers and be in touch with them in a different way,” Lackie said. “They don’t have to wait for us. When they have an idea, an agent wants to be able to act on it.”
The keep-it-simple approach seems to be working. None of the dozen agents working at the new brokerage had to be recruited, the owners said.
“We want to attract people who are serious about being in a business, and who are prepared to act on a business plan,” Kanyar said. “Our role is to back them up and to give them ideas.”