Editorial
Front Page - Friday, February 19, 2010
Realtor rises to challenges of the market, expands business
David Laprad
Realtor Susan Swicegood is a certified luxury home specialist with Keller Williams Downtown. While she’s an expert on the North Chattanooga and downtown markets, changes in the economy over the last two years have compelled her to expand into other areas.
- David Laprad
Realtor Susan Swicegood has a good sense of what makes a house a home.
“A home is a warm, secure place where you go at the end of the day to be yourself,” she says. “It’s where you can sit down on your couch with a glass of wine and your dryer running in the background and feel good about where you are. It’s where your cats and dogs and kids live; it’s where the heat and lights work; it’s where you feel safe.”
Swicegood, an agent with Keller Williams Downtown, says she and her family have such a place in North Chattanooga. At the end of each day, she can return home to her husband and three dogs, throw on some comfortable clothes and relax. That time, however, sometimes comes a little later than it does for most people, as Swicegood spends many of her waking hours doing everything she can to help her clients find a place to call home, too.
The trick is that everyone wants something different.
“When I get a new client, I sit down with them and try to find out what’s important to them,” she says. “It is location? Is it the number of bedrooms and bathrooms? Is it square footage? Everyone has a different answer, but in the end, it’s all about comfort and bringing a family together.”
Realizing she left out an important demographic, Swice-good mentions single people as an example of how different clients want different things in a home. “Single people want a place where they can entertain and interact with other people,” she says. “Location is important to them.”
To make sure she’s armed and ready to address the needs of her clients, Swicegood employs the latest technologies, market research and business strategies. “Most prospective buyers have already looked at homes online before they call me,” she says. “So it’s important for me to do my homework. I study the different areas of the city and become familiar with them before I take people to look at houses. You have to take advantage of the research that’s out there.”
Swicegood also uses technology to put her product where customers are looking. For example, she uses an online service that posts her listings on 32 Web sites, allowing people searching for homes on the popular search engines to see what she has. “When people go to those Web sites and look at my listings, the site records their visit,” Swicegood says. “I can then send that information to my clients so they can see how many people are viewing their listings online.”
Also vital to Swicegood’s clients is the feedback she gathers from potential buyers on whether or not they feel a home is appropriately priced, has sufficient curb appeal and is attractive on the inside. “Pulling all of that information together from different sources and putting it together in a manageable form for a client is time consuming, but also helpful,” she says.
Although Swicegood has the skills of an old pro, she’s only been in real estate for six years. In her former life, as she describes it, the Knoxville native managed all of BellSouth’s residential call centers in Tennessee. Her work for the company eventually brought her to Chattanooga, but in 2002, BellSouth closed the office. While she could have taken a position in either Nashville or Atlanta, she and her husband loved Scenic City and did not want to move.
“We had a daughter in Baylor, and her life would’ve been over if we’d moved, so we stayed here,” she says. “And I started a second career.”
Swicegood says she’d always been interested in real estate, so she obtained her license, went to work at Crye-Leike and reached out to her connections in the community. At the time, she didn’t realize her first few listings would steer her toward a particular market in which she’d become known as an expert.
“When I first started out, most of my business was in North Chattanooga. I had a lot of connections in the community as a result of my prior job, so I was fortunate to get a couple of high end listings to begin with,” she says. “So I became a luxury property specialist.”
Tough market conditions over the last two years have forced Swicegood to venture beyond her backyard to seek out listings. Once again, her connections proved to be vital, with her contacts in the private school sector opening the door to listings in Signal Mountain, Lookout Mountain, East Brainerd and Ooltewah.
Swicegood has also had to expand her business beyond the luxury sector, since any house over $500,000 has been tending to stay on the market a while. Today, she finds herself doing more work in the $200,000 to $400,000 range, especially as the appraised value of some homes has fallen. The hard part, she says, is helping clients to understand the harsh realities of the industry.
“The value of a house today is not necessarily going to be what it was two years ago,” she says. “So you’ll go to an appointment and your client will have an appraisal that says his home is worth $350,000, and you have to tell him everything else in his neighborhood is going for $275,000,” she says. “Those are difficult conversations to have, and I sometimes lose listings because I tell my clients the truth as opposed to listing their house for too much money.”
Swicegood had taken the changes and challenges in stride, and today, is just as pleased with her second career as she was when she started out. “In my previous job, customer service and marketing were huge parts of what I did, and I was able to bring those same skills to real estate and apply them to a one-on-one situation,” she says. “I love working with a client and establishing a relationship with them; I love the satisfaction of seeing them get what they want.
“When you buy a home, it’s a huge investment. It’s the biggest purchase most people ever make, so I want to make sure they buy the right one, which means I have to connect with them and then work hard to find what they want.”
By relying on Swicegood’s innate understanding of the things that make a house a home, her clients can rest assured she’ll be able to do just that.
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