Resort Symposium Huge Success

“Awesome” says Ken Libby, of Stowe Realty, in Stowe, Vermont in describing the recent Resort and Second Home Property Specialist Symposium held at the Mauna Kea Resort in Kona, Hawaii. Ken is the 2006 Chair of the National Association of Realtors® Resort and Second Home Property Real Estate Committee. “The Symposium just got better and better over the three days of sessions. “

“The Hawaii Symposium was unbelievable. The setting was outstanding, the weather was great and over 300 attendees were exposed to an outstanding three days of information. One of the highlights, educationally, was the opportunity for those present to take a Transnational Referral Certification (TRC) course. The TRC course focuses on international business and includes a referral network for those who have taken the course. It has initiated a formal process for making sure that commissions are paid regardless of which country is involved.”

The Symposium was a networking and training opportunity for Realtors® seeking RSPS certification. There were three days of seminars covering resort and second home real estate trends and economic forecasts. The courses featured two days of intensive training in the selling methods and techniques that are particular to resort and second home marketing.

The event drew more than 300 participants from 39 States and  4 Countries (Canada Mexico, France and Belize).

A milestone was reached at the recent gathering. Five real estate professionals were awarded the new RSPS certification. Of these five, three were in attendance at this year’s event, Deb Howard, Sue Pratt and Jerry Baranski.

According to Deb Howard, chair of this year’s Symposium (and one of the first five to qualify for RSPS), the event came off  “…without a hitch. We had a very receptive audience for the program. The attendees were incredibly enthusiastic about the educational opportunities we were able to provide them.”

Deb was involved in early discussions about developing the new certification program. She is an owner/broker of Deb Howard & Company, in South Lake Tahoe. California. ”In the beginning, we struggled with how best to define our market niche. When we sought to describe the evolution in the real estate market, it was impossible to ignore the expansion of resort properties, vacation and investment properties as opposed to primary residence and commercial property sales.”

Many years of effort preceded the first RSPS certifications being awarded at the Symposium. The need for a new certification was recognized by a diverse group of real estate professionals selling properties in nearly every region of the U.S.  Dramatic shifts in the real estate market began to appear as the huge demographic changes associated with the baby boom generation began to impact the types of real estate being bought and sold, how properties are financed and how they are taxed.

Of these changes, Deb said “we had to develop an new business model. With the emergence of the internet, Realtors® are no longer the guard at the gate with the keys, granting access to properties. Formerly, this was our absolute value to prospective buyers. Today, more than 80 percent of buyers and also to a large extent, sellers, start their property search online. At the beginning, this allows them to find areas and/or properties that may be of interest to them. Later, many want to contact a Realtor® who knows the nuances of the neighborhood and of the community in which they have found a property. This is the huge value we bring to the transaction.”

“Today it is necessary to understand complex investment strategies and tax regulations that impact buyers of second home properties. We are still in some sense the guard at the gate, but in a different way than in the past. We now hold something more important than the keys to a particular property, we hold the information that provides context for prospective buyers on the properties and communities they are interested in.”

In 2003, Ken Libby observed new trends in the Vermont real estate market. This is when he became involved with the effort to secure approval from the NAR for a training program that would result in a certification process for Resort and Second Home Specialists.

Ken became a member of the Leadership Team of the Resort Committee within the NAR. Initially, their efforts did not persuade the association to offer training for this market segment.  “They did not feel that the ‘Resort Broker’ was unique. “ We believed that the Resort Broker had a unique client-base, which, in many cases was international, and that NAR needed to provide special training related to this market segment.  At about the same time, the NAR study on second homes was released which showed that in 2004 about 36 percent of all residential sales were second homes or investment properties.”

Ben Blair, of Coldwell Banker Griffith & Blair in Topeka, Kansas, served as the Resort Committee Chair in 2005.  He and Ken worked together “to review the positives and negatives of establishing a new certification.” After quite a few meetings the group achieved success, and with the active cooperation of NAR staff the new certification process began to take shape.

Another of the first five to achieve RSPS certification was Jerry Baranski, owner/broker of Bay Harbor Properties, in Bay Harbor, Michigan. As a longtime owner/broker originally from the Detroit area, he was involved at an early date with the Certified Commercial Investment Member (CCIM) certification program, the first market segment-training program initiated by the NAR.

After moving from Detroit to northern Michigan and “being involved for more than six years, full time in the Resort business”, he observed that ”the differences in the resort real estate to general brokerage business was greater than between the commercial real estate and general brokerage business. “

When the first Resort Symposium was planned in Los Cabos, Mexico in 2003, Jerry took part enthusiastically. This meeting brought together for the first time more than 140 real estate professionals from North, Central and South America involved in the resort business. “During those three days together, we concluded that our needs as resort brokers were distinctly different than the needs of those selling primary residences. The kinds of marketing approaches we use, the types of mortgages and tax code issues related to vacation or investment properties are very different than what you encounter in general brokerage business. As a result, additional skills need to be taught to specialists selling this type of property.”

Jerry attended each of the three symposium programs in Mexico, Cape Cod and Hawaii. He observes “everybody takes from the seminars something they can use immediately in their business to increase profits…the great ideas communicated have gotten stronger at each succeeding event. The first symposium in Cabo San Lucas was low key, the second at Cape Cod was more detailed and better organized and in Hawaii, it just blew your mind.”

Sue Pratt, a Top Producer for Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Broomfield, Colorado is the third newly RSPS certified broker who attended the Hawaii Symposium. Like Jerry, she also attended the first symposium in Mexico. As has been observed by the other new certificate holders in their respective areas, Sue has also seen baby boomers setting new trends in her market in recent years.

“Most of my clients want to live in warmer climates with nice amenities in popular resort communities. This clientele enjoys golfing, water activities, hiking, fishing, beaches, shopping and a leisurely pace for their own pleasure and that of their families. A casual and affordable lifestyle is very important to them.”

She attended the Resort Symposium held in Mexico in 2003 because she “wanted to discover what the resort marketplace could offer to me. I wanted to be able to provide my clients with the best service possible, so that I could pass on the most current and accurate information regarding their areas of interest. I wanted to find them trusted experts in the fields of vacation home finance and to investigate how the purchase process worked in other parts of the world.”

Sue feels that with the RSPS certification, she has “added a new dimension of service to extend my expertise into the resort real estate area to help my clients reach their own investment goals…The resort symposiums presented by NAR have also enabled me to expand my referral database throughout the country and make face-to-face contacts with other brokers who work in resort communities. These inter-relationships make attendance at the symposiums invaluable and very rewarding. It has enabled us to share our resort marketplaces with one another.”  Sue is already planning ahead for the next Resort Symposium to be held in Vail in June, 2007, where she will serve as a committee chair.

With the planning already underway for the Vail symposium, there are interim goals set by Ken Libby for his tenure as 2006 Chair of the RSPS Committee. “This year we are hoping to see the establishment of a number of statewide or regional Resort Forums throughout the country. The success of the Rocky Mountain Alliance in the West was one of the reasons the RSPS certification was successfully launched this year. They have been seen as an effective organization in the resort and second home market segment for many years. This year, I hope to see a number of such groups formed, thereby spreading the word about the certification and the programs of the RSPS Committee.”

The first organizational meeting will be held in Boston on March 21, and will be aimed at expanding the New England Resort Forum (NERF). By this time next year the committee hopes to have an association up and running in New England. “We are off to a great start,” says Ken, “We have 56 Realtors® from New England that have either taken the 2-day Resort course or attended one or more of the Resort Symposiums.”

The market changes associated with the baby boomers reaching retirement age have only begun to be felt. In the next fifteen years, another boomer will turn fifty every seven seconds. If the past is prologue, then the changes witnessed in recent years by the newly certified RSPS members will accelerate. This rapid expansion will reinforce the need for those selling vacation homes, resort and investment and retirement-associated properties to acquire even more specific skills.  The RSPS program is a great start in that direction, offering participating Realtors® a leg up in an increasingly competitive market.