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If you find something that feels right, it’s a good idea to stick with it.
It’s safe to say that’s how Stephen Kotler, CEO of brokerage Douglas Elliman’s Western Region, feels about his work with the New York-headquartered firm. Kotler has been with Elliman for more than three decades, starting as an agent in New York and rising to his current position, leading much of the firm’s sales operations.
Kotler spends most of his time in Texas these days, though he can often be found scouting brokerages in Aspen and LA, which is where he was when he spoke with Inman before his appearance at Inman’s first Connect Austin conference. Oct. 9 at Brazos Hall.
Kotler shared with Inman details about his day-to-day at Elliman, thoughts on the industry’s current challenges and how, despite popular opinion, an election year typically has very little impact on the housing market.
Read on to find out more about what Kotler has to say, edited for brevity and clarity.
Inman: What do you do as head of trading for Elliman’s Western Region?
Stephen Kotler: My responsibility is what we call the Western Region, so everything west of the Mississippi, which includes California, Colorado, Texas and Nevada, to some extent. Those are the four states that I take care of, and I spend most of my time in Texas. I bought a home in Dallas, so my family is there.
But I’ve been in California for a few weeks and I go to Aspen at least once a quarter to visit our businesses there, and in Nevada for the new development work we’re doing there. So my job is to take care of the company from a day-to-day perspective.
But I have a CEO named Bill Begert who is also by my side and makes sure the business is running all day and the lights are on. My job is to really think about growth – how we grow the agents we have now, how we consider our customers, how we recruit more good people to the company. Then, the other part of it is really looking at the development marketing work in the states that I look after. A lot going on in Texas right now and a little bit in Nevada. So those are the two hats I wear.
It’s interesting. What are your goals for the next year for the Western region?
Before I answer that, just a little background, I’ve been with the company for 33 years, and I started in New York as an agent. In 2005, I took on a position managing one of our offices in New York. Then in 2014 when we opened in California for a development project, I started spending time here, and I moved to California until now I am working in Texas.
So I went through three owners in 33 years. When I started in 1991, we had 270 agents in the company and now we have just over 6,500.
To go back to your question, the situation is a little different from region to region, but from a high-level perspective, we are thinking about retention and people who are our customers who are here, some, for a short time, and some for a very long time. , a very long time. So maintenance is always a goal as a business.
I consider what I do as a talent agent and talent management. It turns out to be a sales talent instead of a basketball team coach or other human activities where you manage different people. So that last part is important.
Growth is another important part, finding the right people. Our philosophy at Douglas Elliman is not to hire more people, but we really want the best people and it doesn’t mean that the most productive agents are automatically successful, but to identify talent that we can help train and grow as a team. business.
I had a great meeting this morning with someone who is not in the business but grew up in Beverly Hills. Her family has been here for several generations and she’s a mother of three, and now she says, ‘Well, I really want to make money with all these relationships I have.’ So someone like that, where you see that he has all the tools – now we’re thinking, how do we actually bring him in, train him, build a business and grow him. So the other part is growth.
From the development marketing side, development marketing objectives are really identifying opportunities that come to us through current client relationships where we may have an engineer doing a project in Florida who is now looking to do something in another state and they already know. the intelligence we have in our marketing development team led by Susan de França, formerly president of Associated Companies in New York.
So, I think, we are considered the best development advertising company in the country. These are full-time employees. We have planning and design and architects, we have marketing, we have strategic relations, we have finance, and we have legal. So when we go into development, in many cases, that developer may have bought the land and now they’re planning the project and they want to bring us in at the beginning to think about what the project is, how it’s done. , who is the architect.
The goals for the next year with advanced marketing are working on opportunities that come to us when a developer says, ‘We’d like to talk to you about working together to sell a project,’ and, building relationships with developers on this innovation. the cities where we are … so that when they are ready to make a decision about development, we will be the first company, at the highest level, that they can talk to.
How do you think agents are adapting to new industry practice changes, after being paid?
It is a very challenging market. I think there’s going to be a downturn in the market where sellers are working too much on the buy side and they can’t reach being in this new world, how do you win business? Those people, I think you’ll probably see them go into other jobs. So for all brokerages right now, I think that’s the concern.
The way to mitigate that is if you’re going to see less potential work on the buy side or more challenging work on the buy side, it’s to recruit more businesses to have more revenue, more volume.
What are you looking forward to at the festival in Austin?
I will be moderating a new development panel called ‘Embracing The New Urbanity: How Trends and Economics are Redefining Urban Living.’ We have Brad Stein of Intracorp Texas, who is a key client and developer in Austin, and Vipin Nambiar, a principal at HN Capital Partners in Dallas, who owns the Rosewood Mansion in Turtle Creek and the Virgin Hotel. I think he’s one of the leading thinkers about how Dallas is changing, not just from the development side, but from the cultural side. [and] creativity … Dallas has its moment.
I’ve noticed a ton of growth there lately.
Yes, and you have a design district, which will change a lot. You’ve seen companies like that [restaurant chain] The Nation came to the design district, so I think it will be similar to what happened in Miami in the design district, very similar. So it’s a really good place to be. You hear a lot of languages spoken in the coffee shop in the morning, you see a lot of Angelenos, people from the Midwest, so it’s a lot of fun.
And our office is in Knox, which is in the heart of where everything is happening. So I’m having fun with it. It’s a really great city to be in.
How do you feel about the election and how it might affect business this year?
We have a firm that we work with that does a lot of our market data. I asked at the beginning of the year – there’s always this story you hear with brokers that it’s going to be slow because it’s an election year – and the company went back and looked at 40 or 50 year elections, low elections. years as well as presidential election years. And the difference in the amount of business was really small. I mean, there was less than a 5 percent difference from election years to non-election years.
It’s interesting.
People always have a little pause, but it doesn’t seem to really affect the market as much as the narrative that is always there. It’s just a reason for people to say that right now the rush to the market isn’t what it needs to be to see more trading happen, from sellers and buyers.
So until there is more urgency, these salespeople are working hard, and those who can do it and keep their heads down are doing well. So you have to go around and adjust and reinvent yourself when you have markets like this. As rates come down, you’re probably going to see a lot of urgency because people in rural areas with mortgages now at 3 or 4 percent, it’s hard for them to go out and buy. But if we see more price cuts, hopefully, we’ll see an increase in urgency.
I think maybe the third or fourth quarter of next year is when we will see the impact. It won’t be like a boom, but it will definitely be a little ripple in things that get busy. Specifically in the Austin market, our data shows that it’s been a really tough first and second quarter – oversaturation, interest rates, just a lot of things going on with the big employers that were pulling back a little bit. But in the last month, we are seeing a huge increase in activity in listing and signing contracts. So it looks like maybe we’re going through the woods a little bit.
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Email Lillian Dickerson
