BY STEVEN M. THOMAS
Staff Writer
”Your Vero Beach Newsweekly”
November 17, 2011
Oceanfront property has unparalleled appeal. Owning a house on the beach is pretty much synonymous with success, and a majority of the barrier island’s most valuable homes overlook the Atlantic.
These are world-class properties that attract exceptional buyers from around the state, country and world, and it takes an exceptional set of skills to list and sell them.
No one on the island does it better than Premier Estate Properties Realtors Clark French, Cindy O’ Dare and Kay Brown.
In fact, according to MLS records, no one does it nearly as well.
In the past three years, since the beginning of 2009, Brown, O’Dare and French participated in an astonishing 68 percent of all single-family oceanfront sales over $1 million listed by MLS.
“We consider oceanfront to be anything directly on the sand where the owner owns the land right up to the mean high tide line,” says French.
Longer term, French and O’Dare have the distinction of handling one side or the other in eight of the top 10 highest-price home sales in Vero Beach history, including all five of the largest transactions.
They also participated in 15 of the top 17 highest-price lot sales.
“Cindy and I are partners,” French says. “We share everything. Kay is the other core agent in our office and we work closely with her. We probably have four or five shared listings with her at the moment.”
Between them, French, O’Dare and Brown have nearly 90 years’ worth of real estate sales experience and have sold billions of dollars’ worth of luxury homes and oceanfront land.
That kind of success builds on itself.
People with $10-million homes don’t tend to list with agents who have not already sold that type of property, and buyers looking for oceanfront estates want agents who are familiar with all the complex dimensions and details of multi-million- dollar deals.
“We all have tremendous Rolodexes,” says French. “Though it is actually data in a smart phone now instead of a bunch of file cards.”
French and O’ Dare both started building their Rolodexes selling waterfront property in South Florida in the 1980s.
“Cindy had a huge following among entertainers in Miami,” French says. “I was a Palm Beach guy. We ended up in Vero Beach independently, but we met and sparked and have been working together for nearly eight years now.”
“What we did immediately when we met was start marketing to Miami and Palm Beach, networking with our top-producer friends and advertising into those luxury markets,” says O’ Dare. “It really paid off.”
“Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of our sales come from South Florida,” says French.
Operating as French and Company, the pair specialized in listing and selling property worth more than $1 million, gaining a reputation for topend knowledge and expertise.
Kay Brown, who has a degree in education from the University of Florida and taught at St. Ed’s for a while, got her real estate license in 1977 in Vero Beach.
“I was a single mother working as an interior designer when I got my license and I made more money in the first month of selling real estate than in the entire previous year as a designer,” Brown says.
“My first job was with Norris and company. Gena Grove, Jane Schwiering and I bought Cliff Norris out of the company in 1988 or 1989, and I was with them until we started this office.”
In 2008, Brown, O’Dare and French came together to open the Vero Beach branch of Premier Estate Properties, an ultra-high-end real estate company with offices in Boca Raton, Delray Beach, Fort Lauderdale and most recently Naples.
“They are all small boutique operations, like our office in Vero,” says French. “I think there are only 29 agents in the entire company in all six offices.”
Despite the small number of agents, the firm is a luxury property powerhouse with more than $1.5 billion in listings.
Owned by brothers Joseph G. and Gerard P. Liguori in partnership with Carmen N. D’Angelo, the parent company provides its Vero Beach office with tremendous support, ac- cording to French.
“They are fantastic at marketing,” he says of the owners. “Ninety-eight percent of all real estate sales start on the internet and these guys embraced that unbelievably. Our properties are shown on more than 900 websites.”
The company domain name is registered in 32 countries, where listings are described in the language of the land and prices are shown in local currency, and all websites are optimized for mobile devices and GPS guidance.
Besides the powerful Web presence, Premier provides an array of beautifully produced and precisely targeted print marketing products that go to a long list of influential, high-net-worth people and exclusive locations.
Publications include a slick 60- page annual estate portfolio magazine that costs $300,000 to produce and distribute and a monthly tri-fold broadsheet that features selected properties from each of the company’s six offices.
“Tens of thousands of those go out each month,” says O’ Dare.
The glossy publications go to Fortune 500’s list of highest paid CEOs and executives, owners of American professional sports teams, professional athletes in all sports with incomes over $10 million, private homes valued at more than $2 million, 160 executive airports across the county, and to select Ritz Carltons, Four Seasons, St. Regis and other exclusive hotels and resorts.
The annual is stocked in the seatback of every private jet serviced by the leading jet catering company.
Brown, O’ Dare and French supplement the parent company’s print advertising with their own brochures, including glossy monthly broadsheets showing a dozen or more of their listed properties mailed to every home on the barrier island.
“I don’t think anybody else is doing that,” says O’Dare. “When others were pulling back on spending because of the market, we spent more.”
Premier’s listings on Ocean Drive and A1A are advertised in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and magazines around the country that go to affluent readers.
One recent New York Times ad was enhanced with QR code.
“Our ad was the only one in the New York Times with a QR code,” O’Dare says. “Little Vero Beach is leading the way.”
A QR code looks something like a bar code and can be scanned by smart phones with the right app. When scanned, it opens the property listing page on the scanning device, giving potential buyers instantaneous access to photos and detailed information.
The ad French and O’Dare placed in the Times’ Luxury Property Showcase was for a $25 million house on a 15-acre ocean-to-lagoon lot that happens to be the most expensive barrier island home on the market.
It was scanned 13,000 times the first day after it appeared, with each scan feeding detailed information back to the Premier Estate Properties about where the scanner was located, when they scanned, how long they stayed and the price of the property in their currency.
Premier’s Vero Beach properties are also marketed through 2,140 affiliated companies with 6,500 offices and 192,000 associates in 74 countries, including Christies Great Estates, Mayfair International Realty and Luxury Portfolio.
“The affiliation with Christies is a pretty big deal,” French says. “They have global reach and we end up with great British, Canadian and German clients. We are working with a wonderful couple from Sweden right now.”
The day he did the interview for this article, French was on his way to Boca Raton to leverage the Christie’s connection with some face-to-face marketing.
“I will be talking to all the Christie’s affiliates and our Premier affiliates, showing our properties in a big movie-screen presentation to a couple hundred of the top agents in the country, making them aware of what Vero has to offer,” French says.
“That is how we get these tremendous buyers,” O’Dare says. “We are everywhere.”
At the same time, they pay careful attention to local relationships, maintaining close ties with Brown’s former partners at Norris and with other local agents.
“We send our referral business under a million dollars to Norris and it is a nice partnership,” says Brown.
“We get a referral fee, but more importantly we know we are sending our clients who love and trust us to a company that will do a great job for them,” says O’ Dare.
The trio use social media as another form of personal networking.
“Facebook is the best social media tool for me,” O’ Dare says. “If I do a brokers’ open house locally, I post it all over the place on Facebook and a tremendous amount of people come.”
“It is crucial to establish a very good working relationship with other Realtors,” says Brown. “You have to sell them on the properties before they can sell a prospect.”
A deal Premier did this summer shows how experience, hard work, good relationships and effective marketing can come together to create an ideal result.
“We had a buyer fly in on his private jet in August,” says O’ Dare. “We picked him up at the airport and showed him six properties that day. A week later, he called Clark and bought one of the houses in an all-cash transaction that closed in two weeks.”
“We feel we are experts in the luxury market,” Brown says. “We are all excited about what we do and we are bullish on the market.”
“The proof is in the pudding,” says O’Dare.