Take a struggling economy, a seven-year inventory, and a competitive field of 12,500 licensed realtors, and it's easy to see why being successful today in Monmouth County real estate is anything but.

Pauline Poyner, a fifteen-year, fulltime real estate veteran, knows this as well as anyone, if not better than most. When pressed, she will allow that, yes, she is a top producer. But she is quicker to note how grateful she is to have the “opportunity to be successful” and “help people” than to dwell on any milestone of achievement. Suffice it to say that she ranks in the top 1% of all Coldwell Banker agents in Monmouth County and nationwide - she works at their 17 West River Road office in Rumson - and has earned the New Jersey Association of Realtors' Circle of Excellence Sales Award for years, regularly achieving its highest Platinum status for her record-breaking sales.

Realtors not intensely self-driven do not travel far, let alone to the top. “There could be no one harder on me than me,” Pauline says of her work ethic, adding that when she started out, this made her no overnight sensation. Back in 1994, Pauline was a single parent raising three sons (one, today, is a Marine who returned from a recent deployment), and working a handful of part-time jobs, including banquet manager at Old Orchard Country Club in Eatontown, and waitress at the Varsity Club in Fair Haven (today called Nauvoo Grill Club). “I did whatever I could,” she says. Pauline was also a fulltime student at Brookdale Community College, where she played on the woman's tennis team. All this at the age of 36. “Somebody said to me, at the time, you should go into real estate, you'd be great at it, and I thought they were crazy,” Pauline recalls. But she found herself taking a real estate course, then working for a small agency before being recruited to Coldwell Banker, a larger firm with the kinds of resources she realized she'd need in order to grow, at their Fair Haven office. Pauline came up working hard, with no real connections in communities such as Rumson, where she soon made her own.

Remarried and living in Oceanport, Pauline still finds time for tennis in her busy 60-hour workweek (and periodic vacations with her husband, with or without the grandchildren, to her favorite spot, Disney World). And she still loves the business, being her own boss, setting her own goals. “I don't punch a clock, and every day is a different day,” she says, having lived through the numerous up-down cycles of her profession.

Today, the market is good, she maintains, for realtors willing to put in the time and gain sufficient visibility necessary to create a reputation as a go-to, trustworthy realtor - “the type that buyers and sellers will want to reach out to.” This is done through ads - Coldwell blankets the market - but, and this is important, Pauline maintains, it's also done through much on-the-street networking and involvement and volunteer work with the community. In other words, no hiding out in the office. Think branding. Think referrals. And use your BlackBerry.

On the consumer front, while the high end ($2.5 million and above) of the real estate market in the greater Red Bank area is hampered with about 77 months of inventory, there's considerable action with first-time home buyers, Pauline explains. Interest rates for buyers with good credit are often less than 5% - a far cry from the 17% or 18% first-timers faced in the 1980s. Today, those who qualify receive an $8,000 (or 10% of the home's value, whichever is less) tax credit as part of the government's economic stimulus package.

To put things in perspective, a property priced at $500,000 today would have sold for around $620,000 in 2005. Last year alone, in Monmouth County, prices adjusted by some 18%, and this year, according to Pauline, “we depreciated a half of a percent to one percent per month.”

“Every day we have to prove ourselves to the people writing out that commission check,” she says, “and every day we're confronted, as top producers, by the same challenges that face new agents.” For someone like Pauline Poyner, what's not to like about that?

PAULINE POYNER
COLDWELL BANKER REAL ESTATE
17 West River Road, Rumson 732.842.3200