Value of high visibility location for residential RE agency

[Eric James]

I'd like to get a sense of the value of having a high visibility office location for a residential RE Agency.  I'm looking at a location with good visibility along a street with 30,000 vehicles per day.  Half a block away is a cross street with 37,000 vehicles per day. The rear of the building also has signage that is visible from the parking lot of a Walmart located behind the building. I'm trying to get a sense of how much residential RE business having a visible location such as this might provide. This would allow me to think in terms of the cost vs. benefit.  I'd appreciate any insights and suggestions.

[Charlie MacPherson]

@Eric James This is probably wildly variable between markets, but from personal experience, I'm not sure I'd place any value in it at all.

Case in point:  When I got licensed in 2014, I signed on with Weichert Realtors in Scituate MA.  Scituate is an upscale oceanfront town about halfway between Boston and Cape Cod with about 18,000 residents.

The office is located on Front St - the one and only street in the business district.  We had a huge picture window with color prints of various listings around town.

The broker required eight 4-hour shifts on the front desk per month.  I only stayed with that brokerage for 10 months as it was a pretty bad place to be, but in the 320 hours I did on the desk, we didn't have a single walk-in.

25 years ago, I'm sure it was a different story. People would walk in all the time to get a look at the big, blue MLS listings book. That and newspaper ads was where people learned about properties for sale.

These days, people are flipping through Zillow while sitting at the toilet.  We are no longer the "keepers of the data".  Anybody with web access can find properties easier than falling off a log.

I signed on with a C21 office that's almost 45 minutes away from my home because I have a ton of respect for the managing broker.  But my real office location is wherever my iPhone and iPad are.