This year marks Betty Mann Beebe’s 40th year in the real estate business. Today, she and her sons Bob McVeigh and Bill Mann run Mann & Sons Realtors, which she started with Barbara Moore in 1984. Their original office was located where Fractured Prune now operates, on Route 1 near the entrance to Rehoboth Beach.
“I couldn’t have entered the real estate industry at a worse time, with mortgage rates hovering around 18%,” Betty said.
But Betty’s career in real estate began even earlier. In 1974, she first began working for Joe Hudson in residential real estate sales. At that time, mobile units were primarily involved.
“At that time, about 57 percent of all housing units were mobile or manufactured homes, and most were located near water,” she said.
After getting into the real estate business with Joe, she went to work for another real estate company in the area, May Hall McCabe. She then opened Mann & Moore Real Estate in 1984 and kept that name until 2002, when her sons Bob and Bill joined her in the business. The business now operates under the name Mann & Sons.
In 1986, Betty entered the real estate rental business with approximately 40 rental units. Her early contracts included Star of the Sea, Edgewater House and Patrician Towers. Her company currently has over 250 units under contract and rents to visitors and local residents. In the early days, year-round vacation rental revenue was about one-third of the company’s total revenue. Today, it’s close to half that number.
And of course, Betty has seen a lot of changes in the real estate business over the past 40 years. When she started, the median home price in the area was less than $200,000. Now, that number has jumped to more than $400,000. The number of real estate agents and people selling real estate in Sussex County has increased significantly as the region’s population and housing has grown. Although the industry has grown from hundreds to thousands of real estate agents, there are many who are licensed and only work part-time.
Like many other industries, the real estate business is undergoing consolidation, with major local and national companies setting up offices in the region. For Betty and her sons, it was a real opportunity for their business.
“We strive to make our service more personalized and focus more time and attention on our customers,” says Betty. “We also strive to run our business more like a family. Many larger companies charge agent fees for things like office space and administrative support, but we don’t do that. We want our agents to keep more of the money they earn, and we want them to continue working with us.”
Advances in technology are also having a major impact on the real estate business. With high-speed internet now available everywhere, real estate agents can work from home or even their cars, often eliminating the need to go to the office. The same technological innovations have made it much easier for consumers to buy a home. Although consumers don’t have access to multiple listing services exclusive to those in the real estate industry, there are many sites like Zillow and Realtor.com where you can search for a home before talking to a real estate agent. Real estate agent.
In fact, Betty and her sons pointed out that people often research the homes they want to see first and then find an agent to help them with the transaction. Similarly, real estate settlements were difficult and time-consuming to coordinate because so many people were involved in the transaction. And they all needed to be in the same place at the same time. Today, buyers and sellers rarely meet face-to-face.
Looking to the future, Betty sees many changes coming to the industry. One of the big changes recently was the Supreme Court’s decision that buyer’s agents cannot be automatically compensated through a transaction. Instead, the buyer negotiates individually with the agent to determine the level of compensation the agent will receive. Because this happened so recently, her sons believe that the future of this is still far from settled. Betty believes that people who want to succeed in the real estate industry in the future should specialize rather than become generalists.
“Pick a niche and stay in that lane,” Betty said.
Good advice from someone whose 40 years of business experience has helped shape her view of what comes next.
