Nancy Braun: Real Estate shape-shifter and high-tech savant

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The Wall Street Journal and Real Trends consulting and communications company named five Charlotte area real estate agents and teams to their 2013 “Top 1,000” listings.

The highest ranking went Nancy Braun, founder, owner and broker-in-charge of Charlotte-based Showcase Realty. Based on her work in 2012, the 51-year-old Westchester County, N.Y., native ranks as:

• The No. 12 agent in the country “by transaction sides,” representing 426 buyers, sellers or both in 2012.
• No. 1 in N.C. by transactions and No. 3 by volume.
• And No. 1 in both transactions and volume in the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia metro area.

As Braun, The Wall Street Journal and Real Trends are quick to point out, only those real estate agents who applied to be considered for inclusion on the lists could be named on them. So there might be other agents who are just as productive as Braun and the four other Charlotte agents who made the lists: Lars Hedenborg, Stephen Cooley, Leigh Brown and the late Doug Black.

But still, On the Level was impressed.

Braun, married to Mark Linch, a broker for Showcase, is mom to Jason, 7, and Natalie, 8, and her company is active in organizing fundraising events for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Charlotte.

In fact, we found her on Friday of last week in a nearly empty office ─ a stripped-down, high-tech office building near South End ─ because just about everyone else was out setting up one such event.

She stuck around to speak with us.

Were you always independent? I was with Allen Tate (Realtors) for 12 years as a broker, until 2008, when I went out on my own. I was ready to grow on my own. You’re limited in a traditional brokerage, and I needed to venture out into other areas. I wanted to build a business.

What makes Showcase different?  Most real estate firms operate with a sales manager and a slew of independent contractors, and the independent contractors are the ones taking the calls. Mine is very different. I take the calls, and each person we have on staff has an area of expertise, and I am able to get that caller off to the right person on our staff. We break down a transaction; we have experts: marketing, PR, social media, (search engine optimization), accounting. Our setup is different from the way real estate has been bought and sold for the last 100 years. Technology makes that necessary.

Technology? I love our setup. We do really well with SEO (search engine optimization) and blogging. Each unique visitor spends an average of seven minutes on our website. That’s a lot. It means that once we capture them, we keep them. When I opened up in 2008, SEO was one of my first concerns. A marketing person was my first hire, and my SEO person was next.

What’s next on the technology horizon? Video. Lots of video. That’s what we’re doing now. We change constantly. We don’t wait for it to happen; we try to stay out in front of trends, on the internet and in real estate. During the economic downturn, we built up our REO (real estate owned) foreclosures and then short sales business. Now we’re going back toward retail real estate, buying and selling, so we’re looking to hire some independent contractor agents.

So you do use independent contractors? Yes, but differently. The independent contractors don’t answer the phones. We do. We do the client coordination. An employee of the firm answers the phone, or the email, and we capture the person right away. We evaluate the customers’ needs, get them preapproved. We don’t pass them on to an agent until all that work is done. We do use independent agents, but we give those agents pre-screened leads. By the way, the closings used in that Real Trends listing ─ they don’t include the independent agent transactions, just the transactions under my name.

This is a pretty big office; how many people on staff? How many independent agents? We have, mmmm, 13 people on staff, 12 full-time. And six agents, but we are looking for more. We’re also looking for a recruiter, to recruit agents and to coach. We are also looking to hire an investor analyst to fan out and help us find investors. And a real estate admin person. We’re hiring. We’re always hiring.

Always? You were doing that well with foreclosures during the recession? I float ─ we float ─ with the market, and we’re always doing well, always on the edge of the market, shifting with the market. Now the market appears to be “improving.”

I heard “quote marks” around that “improving.” I have mixed feelings about investors coming into the market and buying up houses in the $100,000 to $200,000 range, but not buying anything $500,000 and up. They are altering the market; what happens when they stop? There’s a low inventory of homes on the market, so it appears we are in a recovery, but we’ve never really been in this kind of market before, so we don’t know if the investors are artificially inflating it, giving us a boost. We represent investors here, have investor clients, and I’m not saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing. But when I see the figures that say the market is recovering, I have to sit back and take a closer look, and it’s that sector the investors are buying into driving it.

It says here that you got an undergraduate degree in industrial labor relations at Cornell, then a law degree from SUNY-Buffalo. How’d you wind up in real estate? And why in Charlotte?  I practiced law for a while, corporate law. Then I opened up a small restaurant in Buffalo. That was my first mistake. I ran it for five years, got restaurants out of my system. I came to Charlotte for every reason that Buffalo was not. The warmth. The good economy. It is receptive to entrepreneurs. I wanted a friendly city, a city of the size I can put my arms around. I came here without a job or a place to live really. It was my dad who suggested real estate, so I took a class. And the city has put its arms around me.