Coldwell Banker Heritage has 540 agents in 11 sales offices and serves 17 counties. Sweeney who joined the 57-year-old firm in December 2012 after running sales channels and sales organizations for Cincinnati Bell for 13 years, said he has a vice president of sales and marketing and a vice president of operation.
Credit: JIM NOELKER
Credit: JIM NOELKER
“They’re our two brokers and they handle the day-to-day stuff. I kind of manage more of the strategy,” he said. “I know what makes salespeople tick and can relate to them, so I spend a lot of my time in the sales offices, (and) I do a lot of recruiting.
“I don’t want to say I try to stay out of the day-to-day, but I don’t get into transactional. That’s just not my my wheelhouse. I tend to work on the business, not in the business.”
Heritage Realtors was founded by Jack Fitzgerald in 1967 in the Financial South Building on Far Hills Avenue with “a handful of agents.” That office later moved to a former office at 2000 Hewitt Ave. in Kettering 1973 and became affiliated with Coldwell Baker in 1996, with closed sales volume at $265 million.
It surpassed $1 billion in 2019, $1.5 billion in 2021 and $1.68 billion in 2022 before declining slightly to $1.53 billion in 2023 due to market conditions, Sweeney said.
The past decade has seen Coldwell Banker Heritage expand outside the Greater Dayton area by acquiring Roediger Realty in Springfield in 2015, Lingle Realty in Richmond, Indiana, in 2017 and Coldwell Banker Oyer in Middletown in 2018. It then opened a Monroe office in 2019 before acquiring Bennett Realty in Wilmington in 2022 and Brownlee-Wray Realty in Piqua last month.
Sweeney attributes the firm’s staying power to three things.
“Probably first and foremost, we’ve always been big on training and educating,” he said. “It’s paramount to our success, paid training and coaching. And so we don’t just take on anybody. If someone comes in today and says, ‘Hey, I want to be an agent,’ and they say ‘I just want to be part time and I just want to flip a couple of houses and maybe sell (a few),’ we’re not your group. We want someone who treats us like a profession.”
That doesn’t mean the firm doesn’t have part-time agents, he said. “We do, but they’ve been trained and ... they’re not going to be a liability. They’re going to give a good customer experience.”
A second strength that has sustained the business is its ownership group.
“There’s been four of them and I’m the fourth,” he said. “Our ownership groups have all been entrepreneurs and they’ve always viewed the agent as their client or customer. I don’t list and sell, but my agents ... those are my customers (and) they have their customers. I’m not going after those customers, I’m trying to help them grow their business in the way that they want to grow their business.”
Sweeney said the firm’s third strength is its ability to “embrace and adapt technology,” especially those that can get a property shown faster than ever before without the need for multiple phone calls to verify a showing time.
He said that when it comes to the local real estate market, “2023 versus 2022 was tough, except for the last quarter,” he said. “We saw our pendings up each month (in) October, November, December versus the year before. That’s going to happen again in January.”
The lack of housing availability is creating problems and keeping prices high, which is causing affordability issues, Sweeney said. Interest rates should further decline this year “not a lot, but some.”
He predicts the amount of homes sold in the region to increase by as much as 2% this year after 2023′s 11.4% decline.
“I see it up versus last year, which is a good thing, but the bar is definitely lowered,” he said. “We’re not getting back to 2021-2022 levels.”
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