The new boutique firm is showing the power of online leads and crushing it in the condo game. Bisnow chatted with the founders.
Anastasia Prapas hails from Zephyr and is all about online lead generations—and in a year her company has quadrupled from four to 16. She spent 10 years in Cambridge, MA, acquiring clients through sites like Zillow and Realtor.com. She envisioned a system in place in which the broker could chat with the end user. In a little over a year, 46 Bay Area units have traded under her hat. That's a big figure—especially considering there's so little inventory. Using tech as a tool is key.
Commercial space isn't much easier to nab; their newly inked office at 735 Montgomery took months to lock down and it's still not ready (right now the company sits in a Regus space at 425 Market). Here's her partner, Kevin Markarian, anxiously awaiting their new 2,200 SF office to be ready. Over 70% of the properties sold through their firm over the past year have been acquired from online lead portals and through its conversion tools.
One of the hot sites up for grabs is the Rockwell at Pine and Van Ness (above), and the company has sealed the deal on a few. Anastasia says people are looking for new construction, and she's seeing staggering offers that are, at times, 50% over asking price. She's encountering a mixture of foreign investors and a lot of cash buyers with multiple bidding. In a normal market she sees six to eight months of supply; but here it's just one to two. Interest rates are so low that people are willing to bid higher.
Anastasia describes her firm as "noncompetitive"—like a real estate family that helps one another out. A Harvard study proves that people opt to go with another broker within five minutes, so they respond at record speed—especially in S.F. (aka coffee breaks are cut short). There's additional work dumped on their plate, she adds; California is a non-attorney state, which means the broker picks up all the slack when it comes to change of ownership laws. The average price has escalated over $1M for a one-bedroom, and they deal from an $800k to $5M casa. It can depend on what time of year it is, she says. Here is a pic of their new office at 735—opening date TBD.
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