Dear Friends:
Some of you may have already seen the story from The Real Deal May issue ranking NY’s Top Boutique Firms. The link to the story is provided here for your convenience.
Upon reading the story, our steep drop from 4th place in 2008 to 10th place in 2009 may promote thoughts of decline and worries about our company’s direction and future. While we congratulate our competitors for making this list and we commit to working even harder to become a better company regardless of any “lists”, I feel it is important to clarify the company’s position regarding our perceived decline in these well publicized rankings:
The criteria for the rankings has been “Total $$ Value of ACTIVE Manhattan Listings” and the main reason for our plunge in these rankings was that our “Total $$ Value of ACTIVE Manhattan Listings” has precipitously dropped from 2008 to 2009. 2009 was one of the deepest real estate recessions in history, so many companies were accumulating active (i.e.: unsold) listings and thus increasing their total value for this criteria. Other companies like us were not collecting them – we were selling them.
I want everybody at BARAK to keep in mind that I am extremely appreciative and proud of all the work of so many people in our company are doing, and how our salespeople did the near impossible last year by reinventing themselves and refocusing their businesses, and therefore were able to get so many of our listings sold. It is a terrible, even a deadly situation for a real estate firm to accumulate listings and maintain them unsold, since the costs of human hours and marketing shoot through the roof while no revenues come in.
I am sending a letter to The Real Deal Reporter and Editor but regardless of what they’ll do and in spite of what anybody would ever write or say, I invite all of us to focus on the following: East Side Expansion, Best Quarter in Company History, 2009 Revenues 8% higher than 2008 during the worst recession since the 1930’s, Tripe R Program, etc. Let’s strive harder to get just a little bit better everyday and while we continue to pay attention to “lists”, rankings and publications, let’s just be confident of who we are and challenge each other to better ourselves. Let’s be proud of the work we do and of what we have accomplished, and let’s be humble because there is so much more we have to achieve.
Thank you for your association with us and have a wonderful day.
Barak
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