Whether sales are slow or strong, some CRSs wear multiple hats to earn additional income on the side.
By Michael Chazin
When Certified Residential Specialists have a need to earn extra dollars or a desire to pursue a lifelong passion, they will undertake various activities to supplement their real estate incomes. Whether they initiate activities directly related to their careers or go after interests related to personal pursuits, they seem to find a way to pour those efforts back into the real estate business.
The Photo Pro
When Ken Jansen, CRS, first started to do real estate photography, people still loaded film in their cameras and took it to a photo processor. Today, all his photography is digital, and it serves as a valuable asset on the listings for the houses he sells.
Five years ago he started to do photography for fellow agents for a little bit of pocket money. He casually offered his services around his office; before long, there was more business than he could handle, so he raised his rates.
He uses a professional-grade Nikon D810 camera with an architectural-grade wide-angle lens, which enables him to produce high-quality images. He uses photo-processing software to produce images with colors inside the room as bright and saturated as the colors outside the window.
Most of the time his customers repeat and refer business, so he doesn’t spend much time looking for new ones. And with 425 agents in his office, there are always new agents looking for high-quality photos.
The Condo Consultant
Samantha Reveley, CRS, works at Dickson Realty in Reno, Nevada. When high-rise condominiums first went up there a decade ago, she was one of the first agents to sell the properties. It was a newer concept—until then a new building hadn’t been built downtown for 25 years.
She sold most of the units in one building and worked as sales manager in another for four years. As the only agent in Reno with experience selling high-rise condos, real estate brokers and developers started to call her with questions. Before long she became known as “Queen of the Condos.”
A year ago she leveraged her expertise to serve as a paid consultant for a developer building a high-rise downtown.
“It didn’t occur to me I could get paid for it,” she says. “I’m going to sell what they build anyway.”
The Video Virtuoso
When Julian Coiner, CRS, learned from his girlfriend that the Kauai visitor’s channel needed talent for promotional videos, he saw a great opportunity to support the community and his own business.
His first commercial was a public service announcement on ocean safety. From that modest beginning, he went on to star in videos for Kauai Zodiac Tourz, Skyline Eco Adventures and others, and also host a hiking show.
Coiner has his own real estate firm in Kauai, Hawaii—Agent 007 Real Estate, Inc. He does PSAs for the visitor’s channel for free, but uses talent fees for the other work he does to offset production costs for his own videos. At the end of the day, he gets real estate videos produced for a fraction of what they would cost on the open market.
The Flipping Fanatic
Flipping has been made popular by cable TV shows, but Lauren Selinsky, CRS, contends that real life is nothing like that. Selinsky learned the details at her family business in Texas, and when she moved to California, she continued flipping before earning her real estate license. Today, she and her husband, a real estate broker, typically flip one house a year and earn an average of $33,000 on each transaction.
Selinsky, a REALTOR® with California Coastal Real Estate in Aliso Viejo, California, looks for several elements when choosing a property: “It is distressed, not on the market and not owner occupied,” she says.
She maintains a stable of tradespeople that she depends on and uses regularly. They consult on whether the property can be updated without incurring major expenses and then work on the renovation. “My kitchen and bath guy typically can complete a demolition and installation in three days.”
Another key consideration is having a big enough yard to develop attractive landscaping.
For the last two years Selinsky has actually flipped two houses. “It keeps me busy and helps me get more clients,” she adds. “It’s a win-win.”
The Cultural Champion
Tim Burrell, JD, CRS, wants to change real estate negotiating and make it less confrontational. He teaches what he calls collaborative negotiating. “Instead of a fixed pie where the more I get the less you get, we expand the pie and everybody gets more,” he says.
Burrell, an agent at RE/MAX United in Raleigh, North Carolina, at one time worked closely with his daughter. She always told him he should write a book on negotiating. When she left the business in 2009 to return to teaching, that is what he did.
His book—Create a Great Deal: The Art of Real Estate Negotiating—led him to teach negotiating skills through continuing education classes to other agents and develop a consulting business where he charges agents $200/hour to solve their problems. “Most of the time I end up solving problems in a half hour or less,” he says.
Burrell solved one agent’s real estate problem in 30 minutes, and he sent a bill for $100. He got a check back for $500. When he asked that agent why so much, he was told, “I was going to make nothing and instead I got a check for $12,000.”
The Jam Genius
Lorrayne Ingram, CRS, at Coldwell Banker Burnett in Apple Valley, Minnesota, has made jam for nearly 20 years and regularly gives jars away to people at work and at church. When she needed to generate new listings in 2009, she gave jam to past clients with a note asking if they knew anyone in a housing jam. They responded, and she generated some new listings.
Raspberry jam is her staple, as she has an ample supply of raspberries in her backyard. Then with help from friends, neighbors and clients, she acquired grapes, apples, crab apples, cherries, strawberries and rhubarb. Next she expanded her efforts from jams to jellies. “For jam, you just pick berries, wash them, cook them, and in a couple of hours you have jam,” she says. “Jelly is a long, precise and painful process.”
She entered county fair contests with stellar results more than a dozen years ago, and more recently the state fair, where she has taken home several ribbons.
While she earns a small income from her efforts, her greatest joy is the appreciation she receives.
The Music Maker
Before getting into the real estate business, Allen Smith, CRS, was an audio and video DJ known as Al-Ski Love. After becoming a REALTOR®, he wondered whether he had time to continue spinning music. “It’s my creative outlet, so it was an easy answer,” he says.
As co-owner of SPIN and having DJ’ed for the White House, Google, HGTV, and numerous weddings and REALTOR® events, Smith has found the two businesses are complementary. “When we engage with a special event client, the process includes initial consultation, planning and execution, and completion of post-event items,” he says. “Ongoing communication is essential to ensure the process goes smoothly. It’s like engaging with a real estate client.”
Smith is also combining his two passions at Sell-a-bration® 2017, where he is donating his DJ services. “I’m excited about the opportunity to spin music, and I’m also looking forward to attending my first Sell-a-bration®.”
