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the LBI real estate marketplace since 1983

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Big Decision at Sand Dollar Real Estate

A new logo, a new look; the same innovation & quality service since 1983

That’s right! Sand Dollar Real Estate -- we are back to our original name. We have chosen to end our affiliation with Coldwell Banker. A lot of thought went into the decision to drop the franchise after 22 years, but at the end of the day this was definitely the right choice for us and for you, our customers and clients.

Coldwell Banker Corporate, along with their parent company Realogy, (which also owns the C-21, ERA, Better Homes and Garden and Sotheby’s franchises) has hit on very rough financial times these past few years. As a result, we saw corporate pulling back on programs and support personnel to cut their debt load.

In comparison, 2010 has been one of our company’s best years since opening Sand Dollar Real Estate in 1983! (We now rank as the #4 Realtor in closed business on LBI.) How did we accomplish this in these tough times? It was with a sincere commitment to offering the highest level of service, designing the most useful educational programs and creating innovative marketing tools for our LBI buyers and sellers. Three years ago, when we began to realize that Coldwell Banker was basically leaving us to our own marketing efforts for LBI, we took the initiative to rev up our local programs and marketing systems. And as this year demonstrates, the results have been great.

LBI is a very unique second home market niche. Sand Dollar has over 27 years of successful experience servicing this niche and we have gained a genuine feel for what our customers and clients desire and need. We can, and do, react quickly to market changes. This is often not the case for large real estate corporations. In the case of Coldwell Banker, they seem to have focused their reduced resources on the primary home market where their ‘company owned’ offices are located.  So there have definitely been times we were feeling our resort buyer and seller was getting ‘short changed’.

Here is a key example: The number of buyer or seller referrals we receive from Coldwell Banker Corporate has been dwindling over the past 3 years. Referrals were one of the major reasons Sand Dollar joined the Coldwell Banker network. This year, not one referral was sent our way. Upon investigation, we found out that their ‘company owned’ real estate office in Brielle, NJ had been and would be servicing all LBI referrals. In our opinion, there was no way this was in the best interest of our LBI buyers and sellers to be serviced from a company located almost 50 miles away.

The reality of this situation is we have been creating our own success for quite some time. The franchise fees are high and it became very obvious this past year, we were no longer getting much of a return for the money we were sending to corporate on a monthly basis. Now these dollars will be used much more effectively for our clients, not for corporate advertising but for LBI advertising and promotion.

Over the years we often felt stifled by the corporate box logo. Now, we can be even more creative and effective in this specialized LBI real estate market. Sand Dollar is free to be “out of the box” with no boundaries when it comes to assisting our buyers and sellers realize their dreams about homeownership on Long Beach Island. We were very successful before joining Coldwell Banker and know that we will be an even stronger company, especially in these tough economic times, as your local and locally focused real estate office.

Our commitment to you is to be the best we can and we know this is the right move at the right time for ourselves and therefore for you -- our clients and customers.