Almost every company is experiencing changes.
Even if homeowners are scarcely moving from their residences, there's been a great deal of changes among the agents and offices of the local real estate industry. Down times tend to bring interchanging parts at the business end of real estate. Frequent have been the movements of offices and agents in recent times.
The landscape of companies is almost completely changed from about a decade ago. Remember when it was Jon Douglas and Fred Sands dominating Malibu, with about 75 percent of Malibu home sales attributed to their brokerages? Both Mr. Douglas and Mr. Sands sold their businesses, for about half a billion dollars combined, to the company that remains the local leader since.
Coldwell Banker had little presence in Malibu in the 1990s until the national firm, suspecting a boon in real estate, gobbled up most of the local agents with its acquisition of Jon Douglas in 1997 (which had merged with Prudential California Realty two years earlier) and then Fred Sands in 2001. Coldwell Banker has remained the home of nearly half the agents in town, and produced more home sales than all the other companies combined during the past decade.
One Coldwell Banker agent alone accounts for about 20 percent of all of Malibu's business. The top four producing agents in town are all Coldwell salespeople. Still, the down economy and the increased rental costs led the company to combine two offices. About a year ago, two offices under the management of Kim Collen-Ross merged into one. The so-called East office at Pacific Coast Highway and Webb Way was closed and its 50 agents merged with the remodeled Colony office located at Webb Way and Malibu Road. Since the closure, the PCH location, owned by the City of Malibu as a part of the Legacy Park property, has remained empty, though a recent agreement will bring the Super Care drugstore to the location.
Besides the Colony office, now home to about 75 agents, Coldwell Banker has kept a prominent west office at Heathercliff on Point Dume, where about 40 agents reside. That office is managed by Jay Rubenstein, who has 30 years of local management experience.
A similar mid-Malibu consolidation in early 2009 was made by the Pritchett-Rapf company. Closing their office in the Cross Creek Plaza near Radio Shack, all agents were combined into the Malibu Road office across the street from the Colony Plaza, near the news stand. The Pritchett-Rapf company, with about 50 agents, represents two generations of participation in local real estate. The Pritchett and Rapf families combined forces, agents and several offices in 1994. Principals Jack Pritchett and Jim Rapf oversee the operation, with Jeff Chertow as manager.
Perhaps the most famous brokerage location in Malibu is at Cross Creek/PCH. Prudential Malibu Realty opened the modern version of a real estate office there in 2001, primarily owned and staffed with agents previously with Fred Sands before the Coldwell Banker buy out. That location has been in existence as a real estate office since the 1940s, most often featuring the long-time Malibu Realty, now defunct. Previously still, the leader in local real estate, the Art Duncan Company, was housed there. Prudential has about 50 agents, under the guidance of manager Mike Novotny.
The Prudential Company also claims one of the few construction efforts currently underway of any kind in Malibu: The reconstruction of the Point Dume office at Zumirez and PCH. The previous facility was built in 1945 as a sales office for the Point, when only a handful of homes existed on the barren peninsula. The new space will open this summer.
The volume of real estate sales last year, excluding sales of condos, mobile homes, or raw land, was less than half the years 2004-2007 (approximately $400 million in 2009 compared to more than $900 million in the hottest four years). Volume this year is projected to be similar to 2009, which was less than 2008.
The pie of commission dollars, more than half of which is sliced up among the top 10 Realtors in town, is fully doled out among an aggregate 250 local real estate agents.
Many new companies not in existence a few years ago additionally fight for market share, but changes are afoot.
Sotheby's has run an operation in the high-rent central kiosks of the Cross Creek Plaza for about a decade with up to 20 agents. (The site was once the long-time home of the Jim Rapf Company). Sotheby's and its agents are planning a move at the end of the month to an undisclosed location.
Taking over the space soon at Cross Creek will be Westside Estate Agency, or WEA. Their move is from the large office building behind the green car wash adjacent KFC on Pacific Coast Highway, where they have been since 2007 with about a dozen agents. WEA originated in 1999 as the brainchild of Kurt Rappaport and Stephen Shapiro, super-high producing Realtors in Beverly Hills. Malibu is their one other office.
Three years ago, Katie Bentzen and Eytan Levin, among the top producing agents with Pritchett-Rapf at the time, split off to form their own company, Bentzen-Levin. Housed in the refurbished building at 22611 PCH (once the long-time home of Malibu Travel), several agents have joined the brokerage since it opened. Change has come there as well, however, when the principals recently parted ways. The firm has become simply Levin and Associates.
Meanwhile, the brand new Arete Realty (ahr-I-tey, a Greek word that means virtue) is Bentzen's latest endeavor, located at Heathercliff and PCH.
Malibu's longest continuously running real estate company by far, Busch & Associates, maintains business from its location at 22333 PCH where it has been for more than 30 years. Iconic Louis T. Busch was the second of three generations of local Realtors in Malibu.
Virtually every building in Malibu has housed a real estate office at one time or another, and almost every realty office in town has once been something else. The aforementioned Coldwell Banker Colony office, for example, Malibu's largest real estate space, which was once Bank of America before the bank moved across the street.
With about 250 active agents, even in down times, the local real estate business is the number two local employer in the Malibu area, behind only Pepperdine University.
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