Rose Bock figured she would retire from her 30-year career in real estate in 2010 when her company, The St. Joe Co., relocated its headquarters to Panama City.
But she kept getting phone calls.
“When I was with St. Joe’s, I couldn’t help anybody else,” said Bock, the company’s former vice president of sales. “Afterwards, this all just kind of happened.”
“This” meaning a new career for Bock as a real estate consultant.
Today she’s a go-to person for market studies, employee placements and customer-exit surveys as Rose S. Bock Consulting.
It isn’t just Bock’s 15-year plus tenure with Northeast Florida’s most powerful developer that recommends her to clients. She long ago carved out a place in real estate, through memberships in Realtor and builder associations, a past presidency of the builders’ Sales and Marketing Council when it was ranked No. 1 in the nation and a decadelong sales partnership that turned heads for its novelty and success.
It began when two teachers started looking for a way to break into the world of movers and shakers.
Shifting focus
In the mid-1970s, Bock was Fletcher High School’s Dean of Girls. Her best friend, Abbi Schaefer, had taken over her old English class.
Bock’s husband at the time was struggling to get a new business going and Schaefer had a son in college. Neither friend ever thought of taking a day off work.
“We both were always hungry. We both needed money,” Bock said.
Bock’s brother-in-law was being transferred by his company to San Francisco. Her sister, at first a “raving maniac” over the move, shifted into a Zen-like calm.
“I said, ‘What happened?’ And she said it was the relocation company,” Bock said.
In the 1970s, nobody in Jacksonville had ever heard of a relocation company. Bock’s sister showed her the materials — a presentation on where to find houses and their price ranges, information on schools both public and private, and how much groceries cost.
Bock and Schaefer figured they could do a service like that in Jacksonville.
The friends put together a package and started calling executives over summer break.
“We didn’t quit our jobs yet,” Bock said. “We wanted to see if the idea would work.”
The women were green. They dropped by companies without appointments and introduced themselves.
“People would see us, because we were women. It was really funny,” Bock said. “We would just drop in, which was rude as hell, and say, ‘We’re a relocation company and we want to talk to you about moving your executives to Jacksonville.’”
The corporations were moving employees all the time and it cost as much as $30,000.
Even so, the two women never got any clients. Not until a female executive needed to relocate. Bock was out of town when Schaefer got the call.
A first for business
St. Regis Paper Co. was moving a female engineer to Jacksonville. None of the wives of the company executives wanted their husbands to spend a weekend showing houses to the woman.
“One of them actually said, ‘Who are those two girls that came by that had that relocation company?’ And the secretary gave them our cards,” Bock said.
The woman bought a house and Bock and Schaefer got the referral fee from the broker. They had snagged their first client.
“And so we thought, we can do this. We quit our jobs and we opened Intro-Jax,” Bock said.
The duo was slick.
Bock and Schaefer were teachers, so for their presentation, they used transparencies placed on an overhead projector.
The base image was a map of Jacksonville and a series of overlays showed schools, neighborhoods and shopping malls.
“Abbi was terrible with the maps. She couldn’t put them on straight. So I had to put an airplane on every one,” Bock said.
When the airplane was positioned to line up with the airport, the map made sense.
After the presentation they gave the new hires a plastic suitcase from Eckerts stuffed with files.
There was information about Florida landscaping, how to care for St. Augustine grass, how to cook fish, area schools and anything boating related.
“We called it our family pack,” Bock said. “And, people would walk out of there with that little suitcase. They were so proud to have it.”
Their business had no competition.
“People didn’t have relocation services then. You would come to town and it was like – do you want the job or not? You can go find a Realtor,” Bock said.
Pioneering the team concept
Over time, the women refined their methods. They started doing presentations for people who were interviewing, not just those who had job offers.
“Our husbands would say, ‘You’re out there driving around wasting gas. What if that guy doesn’t get the offer?’” Bock said. “’And I would say, ‘But what if he does? He’s only going to know one Realtor in Jacksonville, and it’s me.’”
The friends also did lunch-and-learn presentations for prospective companies at the boardroom of Stockton, Whatley, Davin & Co., a company through which they had become licensed Realtors.
A generous spread of sandwiches, an impressive conference room and a presentation of what new hires would get to see sealed the deal with clients.
Bock and Schaefer’s business model was unique for the time, but even more so was partnership behind it.
It’s not unusual today for agents to work in teams. In the 1980s, nobody had heard of it.
“People would say to us, ‘how is this working?’ They just could not understand how this could be,” Bock said.
But the two women, who had started out as friends, didn’t know any other way.
Both were teachers. They had compatible personalities and opposite religious holidays. Bock worked on Jewish holidays and Schaefer on Catholic ones.
At the end of one year, they itemized their sales commissions. The difference between their earnings was only $1,000.
Bock and Schaefer would go on to open a relocation subsidiary at Stokes and Co. Years later, when the company downsized, the friends drifted into separate jobs.
In 1993 Schaefer moved to Atlanta and went on to run a brokerage there.
“That was a horrible day,” Bock said.
In Jacksonville, Bock moved up the real estate food chain, eventually running sales in master planned communities for residential developer Arvida. When St. Joe bought the company, she continued in a sales management role.
As real estate changed with the times, Bock stayed at the top of the game.
The profession has actually gotten easier than it used to be, she said. That’s especially so when it comes to keeping in touch with clients.
“To think that I ever had a beeper and quarters so that I could call someone from a pay phone. Can you imagine?” Bock said. “It’s wonderful to have cell phones and email.”
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