Advantages of a Boutique Broker

“Today it is about offering more, so we do. It is that simple. Home owners and buyers are busier than ever, and we make it our business to see beyond the house sale to fulfill the deeper needs of our clients. We are masters at logistics. We specialize in life transitions and enhance the buying and selling experience with a high-touch process. How the client feels throughout the experience is extremely important to our success.”

-Suzanne Powers

So, how is a boutique broker different from "big box" brokers?

I previously worked for two of Milwaukee’s largest brokerages before opening Powers Realty Group. Coming from the pharmaceutical industry, I was really surprised about the business models used in real estate. I learned what I could and then created a vision for a brokerage that I thought would create more value for home buyers and sellers, and I decided what I was NOT going to do as I set out on my entrepreneurial journey.

Traditional "big box" brokerages focus on sales growth by recruiting a large number of agents. Their mission statements, time, money, and effort are all focused on growing big. My focus, as a boutique, is on the customer – creating an experience for them that delivers more overall value. My boutique business model is in exact opposition to every one of my competitors, and this makes us unique. Where they spend time, effort, and money recruiting more agents, we focus on what services clients need - and these needs change based on the market situation. This makes Powers Realty Group a great choice to interview when home owners are thinking about selling their homes.

Many people are curious about why I did, what I did, and why I did not franchise the business. For me it was about following my core values, and there has never been a franchise opportunity where the model put the customer first. All the opportunities (there have been dozens and they are still coming) are about mergers, acquisition, and recruitment. The customer experience is NEVER spoken of when these brokerages come around, it is about growth and profits. And this is not who we are.

Powers Realty Group, like many other boutique real estate firms across the country, puts the customer at the center of the business model. You may be surprised to learn that most residential real estate business models are built on agent recruiting. In the world of “Big Brokerage,” the customer is actually the real estate agent - not the home owner or buyer. This may explain why the customer experience is sacrificed and complaints from buyers and sellers consistently reporting a “bad” buying or selling experience are growing industry-wide. The focus is not on the service level offered but on how many agents the brokerage can recruit on a monthly basis.

I began the boutique experience in 2011 by offering a suite of services to our customers. We began with a simple home staging service model and quickly moved into more sophisticated offerings for our clients. Our Vice President Gretchen Keating has a long history of hospitality service and the combination of her service experience and focus along with my professional sales and managerial experience worked well to create what we have today, a concierge service-led boutique brokerage. We tailor every search plan to the customer’s specific home needs, including finding those special houses that may not be on the market yet. And for sellers, we customize every marketing plan to leverage the unique aspects of their home and reach buyers who would be a great fit.

In addition, we go above and beyond what a normal broker does by tapping into our vast hyper-local connections and driving a pleasant, results-orientated experience beyond our competitors. How do we do this? We share. We are a tight-knit group of top producers, we are the local experts in the communities we serve, and we use our network to the best advantage for those we serve.

Our goal is great service, not great volume.