On the Level: Jonathan Osman is an on-the-level Realtor who puts the ‘real’ in real estate

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CHARLOTTE – Realtor Jonathan Osman tells it like he sees it. He does so on his blog, Real Estate News and Opinion, and he did it in person with On the Level.

He’s new-media savvy, naming his website charlottehousehunter.com, after his Keller Williams team name, the Charlotte House Hunter Group.

Osman, a 32-year-old product of a mixed-race marriage (his mother was black; his father is white) is an anomaly in his business in just about every way. And he’s a chameleon, too, nimbly negotiating the market as it evolves, specializing in distressed sales during the recession and then reinventing himself in the recovery.

The Washington, D.C.-area native dropped out of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., where he majored in biblical studies, because he thought he wanted to be in the ministry “for all the wrong reasons – I liked the word entomology and the history of it, but mostly because it made my mom proud.”

In Charlotte, he has turned his talent for congregation into pulling together and running the area’s Washington Redskin fan club.

The divorced father of a 6-year-old son named Micah got into real estate to survive, and he has made a habit of surviving in real estate. Sitting in the living room of a house he has under contract near the Carmel Country Club golf course, he had no problem telling us how.

You’re pretty sharp, digitally. Your blog is actually up-to-date, newsy and very opinionated.
How and why did you start blogging? What happened was, we moved down here in 2006 and I didn’t know anybody. That’s how I got into using social media for my job: I had to learn the market. It was weird, though. Banks were failing left and right, but real estate agents were out there on the Internet saying, “Oh, it’s the greatest day! We need more rain!” I saw an opportunity to jump in and developed a voice, and people started saying, “Hey, this guy is not just giving us bull—-.” People challenge me about what I say, and I dig that.

And that has served you well? The Keller Williams corporate office said, “Come and do that with us!” I became one of the test cases for the international agency. I teach other Keller Williams agents how to develop a business when nobody knows you. There’s a place within our company called the Agent Technology Consortium, and I’m a member of that. We drive the direction that technology will take for all 100,000 agents worldwide.

What’s that consortium focusing on these days? All firms are struggling with what to do with Zillow and Trulia. We gave away our business to them, and now we are having to pay.

Explain that a little more. In 2007-2008, when Zillow and Trulia were gearing up, they took their data from real estate firms, which saw them as free marketing, and they would bring the leads they got back to you. It became part of our pitch to clients: “You’ll be on Zillow! And Trulia!” Now that has changed. Many firms and groups now have to pay for those services. Now we’re asking ourselves, “Did we give away our businesses?” Now when we enter our data into the local (multiple listing service), we’re asking, “Where does our data go, and when?” Agents want to be back in front of their businesses. It’s very interesting, on a very geeky level.

What’s the key to a successful blog? So many agents go out and are a caricature of a real estate agent, talking bull—- about real estate. They’re not engaging, but engagement is central. It’s a two-way thing. It doesn’t serve anybody to try to be a bullhorn on the Internet. People are all freaked out about online reviews, and having their stats out there on the Internet when there’s nothing to be concerned about. People like transparency and openness and honesty. They don’t like phony. It will be interesting to see how all that takes hold in our business. I embrace it because I think it is genuine.

Why real estate? I went into real estate right out of college. I left (college) in 2002. My mom passed away and I needed time off. I said, “Oh, I’ll go back.” I was one semester shy – I had changed majors – and never went back. I married young – it was one of those things where you’re like, “Whoo! Yay! We’re in love! Let’s get married!” – and we bought a $300,000 house. I was 21 and this is back at the height of: “Do you have a pulse? We’ll give you a loan!” We could not afford it to begin with, and then, six months after we bought the house, the government consulting agency where I had worked since college did not get re-funded, and the whole thing just died. We choked down the payments while we could and then sold it – for $460,000.

Not bad. It was just the right time and we got lucky. I ended up in real estate because when we bought the house, I looked at the agent who sold it to us and thought, “That looks easy!” So I did what every agent does: I put my real estate training on a credit card, went to the beach for two weeks, and at the end I was a real estate agent.

Ha. I know I’m not making it sound glamorous, but it really isn’t. I love it, though. The real estate school was in Ocean City, Md., on a Tuesday-Thursday, two weeks in a row. On the afternoon of the second Tuesday was the test, and that’s pretty much it. If you’re going to have to sit through a few boring lectures, it might as well be at the beach, right? Sadly, that’s what our business has become. I started out in a very small firm, Best Homes Realty, which was one man with a sign working out of his basement. I joined and instantly doubled the size of the firm.

Ha. I really dug it – how pioneering! But I didn’t last long there. Keller Williams was brand new in metro D.C., and I knew nothing; I thought Keller Williams was like the Mary Kay (Cosmetics) of real estate. But I talked to them, and what they had to say rang true to me. That was 11 years ago. When we moved to Charlotte in 2006, Keller Williams was opening an office in Union County, a woman was starting a “team” and needed a buyer’s agent. She was a really good agent but didn’t know how to run an office. In the year I was there, I made only $8,000. That’s when I went out on my own.

And during the recession you specialized in short sales? I didn’t know what one was when I started. An agent came to me with one and said, “Give it a shot; see if it’s possible.” I spent the next month on “How to do a short sale.” We got it done, but only by cutting my commission to nothing. I took all my notes – I’m a compulsive note-taker – and posted it as a blog on ActiveRain, a blog platform. Sellers and agents started coming to me: “Would you do it for me?” It catapulted me into a business, and that got me through the recession. I met an attorney through all this, Jaime Kosofsky, and we started holding training classes. We did three, renting hotel conference rooms, Wells Fargo sent in some loss-mitigation portfolio managers, and we had 200-300 agents. It was basically: “This is what you’ve been told. And this is the truth.” There were so many lies and so much old information out there; it changed by the week. There was more equity loss that during the Great Depression. Agents from every firm in town referred me to short sales, and I built a team doing that – and somehow we got by with no problems with the (N.C.) Real Estate Commission! At my peak, we had five buyer agents, myself and a full-time assistant. We had it down to a science.

That’s got to be a tough thing to do, for all kinds of reasons. For me, it was a therapeutic thing. There were doctors and lawyers, all kinds of professionals, all underwater. I’m a college dropout and I had a job; and these people, these well-qualified people, didn’t. I saw myself on the other side of the table every time. The hardest thing is trying to keep the sale together. The buyer can back out at any time, which often leads to foreclosures. There’s no way to keep them in, no mechanism. The only way is to be better than anybody at everything. The agencies involved gave us all the buyers’ information, so we were able to call them – every day. We kept the process very open, and the buyer knew what was happening as it happened. We just had to be better, and we did well. We could turn an FHA-loan house in 10 days – and we guaranteed that.

How many short sales have you done recently? None. About two years ago, as the market was turning and I was doing fewer short sales, I was in a situation where I was competing on a listing and the seller was very nice but very honest. The seller said he was told: “He only does short sales. If you go with him, people will assume you’re in default.” That’s when I decided to get out. Short sales were great for the soul, but not the pocketbook.

So you had to reinvent? Who knew a real estate agent would be a quasi-home designer and contractor? But that’s what our business is today. I was a specialist; now I’m just like everybody else. So I looked at it and said, “How can I be better than everyone else?” That’s when I engaged a home-stager: Barbi MacKinnon, The Staging Girl; that’s the name of her business. We needed to up our game, have the best-looking house online, so we brought on a great photographer, started doing aerial (photography); his name is Chris McFaul. The blog – I had to turn it away from short sales; now it’s about the market. My assistant now is an English major, and she told me, “You’re a terrible writer!” So now she – her name is Andrea Greene – she proofs and rewrites my stuff.

I don’t want to turn you into a spokesman, and we don’t have to talk about this, but how many people of color are in your business? Is the percentage anything like the population? There aren’t many. And I don’t think so. I went to private school, where I was the other kid of color – only two of us. But high school was 60 percent black. I was shunned because of my mixed heritage. And I was poorer than them, too, because my mother had made that sacrifice (for private school). I was comfortable in my own skin, but to them it was: “You’re not black enough”; “You wanna be white.” And I was, “I just want to be me.” But to answer your question, and this is totally anecdotal, but I lost a listing recently to a boutique, luxury agency, and I got curious. So I went on and did a survey of four leading luxury boutique firms; there was one person of color. Is that your diversity hire? I was happy for that guy, but what does that say? Our industry is mostly women, and largely in the mid-50s. When I started, I was a kid in my 20s. When I pulled up, it was like “Fast & Furious” showed up. I got into it because I needed a job. Most of our industry is part time, something for people to do to make a little side money. And it’s just too easy. You have to take 80 hours of classes to be an agent; it takes 1,200 to be a hairstylist. North Carolina has a longer process now, but we still have a very low standard. Over the next few years, I see the industry changing over, becoming more professional and more diverse. Charlotte is cosmopolitan, but it’s not really multinational. I did have a couple, Mexican nationals who were coming to Charlotte with Electrolux from Sweden. I love it!

You have some very strong opinions. Does that get you into trouble? I have had some inadvertent run-ins with some folks who were frustrated not so much with what I said but with how I said it. I think what it is, is that I am a keen observer with a messed-up personality.

Ha. What good is it to lie to you and you find out I’m a fraud? The best way to do it, to do anything, is to keep upfront.