Reassurance, optimism set up CB&A for rebound
Real estate broker Chance Brown was on spring break vacation in England with his family when President Donald Trump announced a travel ban amid the coronavirus spread. With a business to run in Houston and fearful of being trapped outside the United States, Brown and his family jumped in their rental car, dashed to the airport and hopped a flight back home.
When he got home, the owner of CB&A Realtors, a multi-office residential real estate brokerage with 270 employees, fired up a live Facebook feed to address his staff and agents with one key message: Don’t panic. This type of concern and reassurance helped CB&A become the No.1 Top Workplace among mid-size firms.
Brown spoke about the challenges of operating during a pandemic and how the market has responded.
Q: Your initial reaction was to tell your employees not to panic. What came next?
A: We said we are going to take this time to build stronger relationships, to check on and help our neighbors and we’re going to do the activities we need to do to get our business in a place where, when we come out of this, we come out stronger.
We built out an entire section of our intranet called coronavirus survival guide. For the weeks we were shut in, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we were live usually via Zoom with our group telling everybody what we knew with real verified information.
Q: After the initial stay home orders, homebuyers flocked to the market. How competitive is real estate in Houston right now?
A: We’re seeing all the telltale signs of a seller’s market. A significant number of our listings are experiencing multiple offers or sight unseen offers, which is pretty rare in our marketplace.
What we’re having to do is prepare our sellers in a big way while also setting expectations with our buyers. You’re going to pay full price. You may pay more than full price. That’s just the reality of this market right now.
Q: What’s your longer-term outlook?
A: Hiring is coming back. I don’t think we’re in as big of a forbearance problem as we originally thought. I do think we’ll see a little bit of a tick up in listings of short sales or foreclosures, but it won’t be anywhere near everyone thought it was going to be.
Q: You said earlier you hope to come out of the pandemic stronger. In what way?
A: The forced adaptation to doing things in a more virtual environment is going to change the way agents and clients interact in the future. You can’t replace the interpersonal relationship and you can’t replace the tangible — I want to go see and smell and touch and feel this house — but what we can do is create very real efficiencies in the way the business is done now.
The online buyer consultation is a far better experience for the agent and the consumer. I can have them on Zoom, show them maps, show them where the grocery store is, where the schools are. I can walk them through photos of homes.
My real hope is that these efficiencies that we have created during this time stick.