Gabrielle Enfield in The Portland Business Journal!

Our fabulous broker Gabrielle Enfield is front and center in the cover story of Portland Business Journal by Jon Bell!

Gabrielle Enfield had good reason to be optimistic when she became a residential real estate agent in August 2016.

The Portland native had a deep network of contacts, built during a successful 20-year marketing and communications career representing big-name brands like Xbox and Dave’s Killer Bread. She had the backing of an established firm, Keller Williams Realty Portland Central, that helped generate leads. And she had the support of her husband, with whom she built a financial cushion to help ease her mid-career transition.

It’s a good thing. Despite her impressive Rolodex, and her affable, energetic personality, it would be months before she earned a dime.

“It took four months to close my first transaction,” said Enfield, who now works for Living Room Realty. “I had been working like crazy, but I was not getting paid.”

Part of that is just shifting into real estate. It takes time for new agents to ramp up. Enfield’s principal broker told her it could take up to six months to land a deal.

But there’s also the reality of life as a real estate agent in a market as hot as Portland’s. Housing inventory is low and the number of agents is high, which has heated up the competition for listings and what agents are willing to do to get them. Then there are the online services such as Zillow and Redfin. Not only have those firms put listings, pricing and other data at the fingertips of buyers and sellers, disrupting the industry and transforming the role that real estate agents play, they are now edging into sales as well.

“It’s craziness,” said Laurie Thiel, managing principal broker for RE/MAX Equity Group in Lake Oswego. “It’s just crazy how much work it is to get your buyers ready to go and your sellers ready to go. There are so many questions and just so much swirling around out there.”

Market madness

The numbers tell the story of Portland’s hyper-competitive real estate market.

Most notable is the inventory of available homes. A 3-month inventory is considered healthy, and that’s close to where the market was in January 2015, when the inventory of homes for sale was 3.4 months, according to the Regional Multiple Listing Service. By January of this year, the number had dropped to 1.8 months.

“When inventory’s tight, it makes for a challenging market to buy in, and it can leave people bewildered unless they have good support going through the process,” said Danielle Hale, chief economist for REALTOR®.com.

If you break Portland’s inventory down by the number of houses for sale, there were 5,671 active listings in January 2014. That number was 3,518 this past January, according to RMLS.

Housing ups and downs

One might think that with fewer homes for sale, there might be fewer real estate agents in the market. Not so in the Portland area. Even as inventory has plummeted over the past 10 years, the number of REALTORS® has, at least in the past two years, continued to climb.

gabrielle enfield portland biz journal

No one is forecasting a meaningful increase in inventory anytime soon, in part because homeowners who don’t have to sell see little upside to doing so now.

“If you are selling and moving out of state, it’s pretty straightforward. If you are trying to sell and stay here, it’s a sticky wicket,” said Lance Marrs, a principal broker with Living Room Realty. “There continues to be a traffic jam.”

At the same time, the number of REALTORS® fighting for listings is growing. The number of licensed agents in the Portland area jumped from 6,400 in 2014 to more than 8,800 last year, according to the Portland Metropolitan Association of REALTORS® and the East Metro Association of REALTORS®.

That’s about 2.5 REALTORS® for every listing. Of course, REALTORS® are also representing buyers — and some may not be all that active — but that clientele presents its own challenges, especially as home prices continue to march north.

In 2013, the average sales price for a Portland home was $333,600. Today, according to RMLS, it’s about $430,100. Newcomers to Portland are a major contributor to rising prices. Many of them are arriving from higher-priced locations in California, Washington, even New York. They’re making cash offers, or at least hefty down payments. While bidding wars have backed off a bit, they are still common in desirable neighborhoods.

“It’s become fairly regular,” said Jules Fedota, a broker with Hasson Company REALTORS®. In 2017, Fedota and her business partner, Myles Faulkner, did 41 deals; more than 80 percent of them were multiple-offer situations.

It can be a long, painful experience for cash-strapped buyers and their REALTORS®, who are writing more offers than they used to and are, in many cases, going for long stretches without closing deals — or getting paid.

“I wouldn’t want to start out in this market,” said Marrs, who has been a REALTOR® here since 1995. “But on the flip side, you could make the strong argument that those who started out more recently don’t know any different in terms of market conditions or inventory levels. An agent could benefit from that, because they don’t know what they don’t know.”

Digital disruptors

Mike Hasson, who recently stepped out of the role of CEO of his namesake company after nearly 30 years, remembered the days when REALTORS® guarded and kept watch over huge RMLS books full of real estate listings.

Clients had to come to an agency to find out what homes were for sale. They relied on their agent to keep up with new listings, schedule appointments, pull comps on recent sales, provide insight into local schools and amenities, and offer advice on pricing.

These days, that information and more is available to home shoppers in just a few clicks. Zillow, Redfin and other tech-minded firms are disrupting the industry and forcing brokers to up their games even more.

“(Clients) get a million apps, they go to a million open houses, they see everything,” said Kim Sparrius, a broker with RE/MAX Equity Group.

And the digital powerhouses are only encroaching further into the territory of REALTORS®.

Zillow, both its website and app, manages a huge databases of homes. Prospective buyers can peruse the neighborhoods they’re considering without setting a foot on the pavement. It also provides data and tips on ways to list homes online for free and without commissions. One recently-launched program on Zillow links buyers with investors who are looking to pay cash for homes on short notice.

“The availability of information on (these sites) makes buyers and sellers both more informed on market conditions,” Realty.com’s Hale said, “but there’s so much information that, without an expert to help, it can be a bit overwhelming.”

Seattle-based Redfin, founded in 2004, is also making waves. It’s long provided real estate databases, but it also has agents in cities nationwide, including in Portland. Rather than working on the 6 percent commission model split between listing and buying agents that has been the industry standard, Redfin brokers are salaried employees with the potential to earn bonuses.

Sellers listing a home on Redfin pay a listing fee of between 1 percent and 1.5 percent. They may still have to pay an additional 3 percent to cover the commission of the buyer’s agent, but it’s still less than the traditional model. Buyers who use Redfin get a portion of their agent’s 3 percent commission refunded to them, which pans out, according to the company, to an average of $2,000.

For now, Redfin accounts for only about .7 percent of U.S. home sales, and the publicly traded company has yet to turn a profit. Even so, the company and its digital peers, are changing the ways that REALTORS® operate.

Fight for listings

To win clients on both sides of the real estate equation, REALTORS® are employing a wide range of tactics, including paid digital and print advertising, social media, mailings and the old real estate go-to, networking. Some are also turning to tactics that would have been unheard of even a few years ago.

A prime example is that the 6 percent commission is no longer a given. Not only are companies like Redfin shifting the old commission model, but some brokers are willing to take less just to get the deal.

“We’ve lost deals to agents who’ve discounted commissions,” said Kathy MacNaughton, owner and principal broker with the MacNaughton Group at Windermere Realty Trust. “I think there’s more conversation these days about commissions, and there’s more competition. There are brokers willing to lower their commission to get a listing, so we really have to work hard and demonstrate why we should make 6 percent.”

Compensation structures vary among agencies and agents pay certain fees for services depending on where they are. When Enfield was at Keller Williams, her principal broker had a budget for marketing and advertising that produced leads. Those leads were randomly and evenly assigned to Enfield and her partner, with the principal broker also getting a percentage of each deal.

At Living Room Realty, paid staff members work with brokers on marketing and advertising, and brokers are charged various fees that are paid as a percentage of a commission.

Marrs said there are also agencies out there that work on a wholesale model focused more on volume and less on service, a model that can undercut REALTORS® who take the opposite approach.

“It’s the whole ‘you get what you pay for’ adage,” Enfield said. “As a broker, you have to have a really clear understanding of how you are different and what tools you have that you’re bringing to the table.”

She also said that, while competition is stiff and usually friendly among agents and brokerages, it’s not unheard of for some agents to overstep their bounds.

“Let’s be real, it’s sales,” Enfield said. “It’s absolutely friendly, but we are sales people and we all have that element of competition. There are some people who don’t play nice, and I think that the frequency is starting to increase as the market tightens as a whole.”

That tight market, coupled with rising prices, has many REALTORS® trekking further from their core neighborhoods to find the right home for buyers. RE/MAX’s Sparrius said cities like Forest Grove, Gresham and Milwaukie are becoming attractive alternatives to inner Portland neighborhoods, which is good for those communities but also means REALTORS® spending more time in their cars and slogging through traffic that is only getting worse.

“It will be interesting to see how the traffic will change a broker’s perspective,” RE/MAX’s Thiel said. “Will they go out to Gresham from Lake Oswego as often as they do now? Maybe not. They might refer that business out instead.”

Staying relevant

REALTORS® will consistently tell you, however, that the best weapon they have is their deep knowledge of the marketplace and their ability to build relationships, play hardball and bring all the right resources to bear to win the day.

According to Sparrius, homes don’t sell themselves, even in a sellers’ market. It takes a ton of work to get a home ready to sell and to present it in a way that will command top dollar. Buyers are eager, but they’re also in search of value. In many cases, they already feel like they’re overpaying.

“It’s past the time that you can just stick a sign in the yard and it’ll sell,” Sparrius said. “It might go quickly, but you’re not going to get the price you want.”

Another selling point for agents? Their ability to guide buyers in what can be a treacherous and risky market. With emotions running high and competition stiff, buyers are often willing to waive repairs and appraisals if it means getting the house. Having an agent who understands regulations and legal rights can save headaches later on.

“People are doing things that you wouldn’t have thought of years ago because they seemed reckless,” Fedota, of Hasson, said. “Agents have to know how you can tweak the offer to make it as aggressive and appealing as possible.”

Then there’s the other role that REALTORS® often come to play in the lives of their clients, that of an adviser, or even a counselor, to people on the cusp of making the biggest investment of their lives. Whether they signed up for it or not, brokers end up walking and talking their clients through the tribulations of transactions.

Real estate agents take on all of this without ever realizing the huge paydays that many think come with the business. Certainly some brokers do very well for themselves, but according to REALTOR®.com, the median gross income of REALTORS® nationally in 2016 was $42,500; in Oregon, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s around $50,000 — and it’s an inconsistent $50,000 at that, since brokers never know when the next deal will close.

For Enfield, who’s been in the business for less than two years, the first few months may have been less-than-lucrative, but she stuck with it and soon was heading up. The team she was on at Keller Williams ended with 22 transactions totaling $7.5 million in her first year. Already this year, Enfield has closed four deals with Living Room for a total of $2.6 million.

While Enfield felt prepared for her shift into real estate, she said the “intense volume of paperwork” was more than she expected, and she was surprised by the amount of ongoing education regarding codes, legal requirements and disclosures.

“I think some people believe that all you need is some pluck and a smile, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s hard,” she said. “You can’t fake it. You have to spend time doing your homework, you have to be hungry. You have to bust your ass, but I think that’s just a life reminder.”

Gabrielle Enfield

Broker | OR

She/Her

Real estate can be a wild ride. It's important you find your wingperson.

At Working Magic Group, we understand the important decision of choosing an agent partner for buying or selling in Portland. It's a relationship for the long haul. The team's goal is to apply myriad experiences, both personally and professionally, to help guide client partners through a thoughtful, strategic, seamless and fun journey. Founded by top broker Gabrielle Enfield, Working Magic's goal is to bust down the stereotypes of who Realtors are and how they serve. We are full service brokers, in it for the long haul, and believe in the relationship imperative. We operate from a place of trust with people at the center. Without that, we can’t do our work. Need an understanding of where to start, when it comes to getting ready to sell? We'll put backgrounds in project management to work and let you know what needs to happen, complete with spreadsheets, if you're into it. We've got the magicians on speed dial to show up and get it done so you can hit the easy button. We treat each listing as a brand we're launching and create emotional and sensory experiences that stand out. Custom playlists, anyone? We've been told our open houses are the best in town. Looking to purchase a vacation property and need it to generate rental income? Expect sharp pencils to make sure the numbers make sense. We can even help with the interior design and advise how to set it up to make top dollar. Ready to downsize? We'll be with you on this important chapter and gently guide you to what stays and what goes. First-timer who needs a steady hand to help guide you through the real estate process? Mama Bear's got you covered, and we'll be sure to point out what you need to look for or stay away from. Moving to PDX and need a proxy to get to know Rose City? Gab's a Pac NW native, and even with all its growth and change, this place still gives her butterflies. Plus, her background in video production makes those remote FaceTime home tours a breeze. About Gabrielle Enfield, Founder, Working Magic at Living Room Realty: I grew up in Woodland, Washington, and live in the wooded hills of Bridlemile, where I'm raising my family. #boymom. Today I am the #1 agent at my brokerage - which is Portland's #1 real estate office - and consistently rank in the top 1% of more than 8,400 brokers in the Portland metro. I love what I do and it shows. Before real estate, my career spans two decades of expertise I'm fortunate enough to apply every day. These experiences range from being a TV news anchor (visual storyteller) to helping develop some of the world's beloved brands like Xbox and Dave's Killer Bread (strategy and engagement). I also helped launch Paul Allen's MoPop to a global stage; it combined two of my life loves: music + architecture. I was on the forefront of integrated media, crisis communications, digital productions and managed events and massive teams that delivered headline-making news. I was practically born to sell Real Estate: my Dad is a retired custom home designer and builder, my Uncle is an architect and my Grandpa was a Realtor and developer. I am an active listener, have a keen eye for "good bones", and solving my clients' real estate needs in a creative and often unexpected way brings me joy. In my spare time, I am raising my kiddos to be confident weirdos, championing my spouse Per who is an IP attorney at Nike, hitting the thrift store circuit as often as I can, and volunteering my time as a Broker Advisor at Living Room. In 2023 I launched Hi Buddy Hospitality Group, a burgeoning hostel and restaurant in NE Portland. I also am a member of Project Color Corps Portland Chapter, a national non-profit that collaborates with people to add color to their essential community spaces, creating beauty, belonging, and joy. Please give a call – I'd love to see what it would be like to partner with you. For a look inside my everyday life, be sure to follow along on Instagram. Let's Work Magic together. High fives!

T: 503-388-2788
gabrielle@livingroomre.com