Since late October, Paul A. Leys has served as president of the Rhode Island Association of Realtors. He spoke recently with Providence Business News about what has inarguably been a tough time for many Realtors. Home sales and median prices in the last year have hit lows that haven’t been seen for more than a decade in some places.
PBN: With the turmoil in the housing market, is this a tough time to lead an association of Realtors?
LEYS: After being president for these months, I’m really looking at it as [having] been an opportune time to be in a leadership position. … I’m glad to have had the opportunity to be at it at more of a struggling time, instead of being the head back in 2005, 2006, when everything was on sort of automatic drive and you didn’t really have to think to sell houses. So I see it as an opportunity to provide some good leadership as president for the year. …
The numbers weren’t great for the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year, but we reported the numbers as they were. It wasn’t necessarily great news for sellers, but it was pretty good news for buyers.
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PBN: And the last few months have seen small increases in some markets – what’s happening now?
LEYS: I’m certainly optimistic at this point that if we’re not at the bottom of this market, we’re very darn close or even a little past it – the bottom of the bell curve, as they say. I was down in Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago at a conference and one of the economists said, “It’s not going to be a graph shaped like the letter ‘V,’ down and sharply back up. It’s going to be more like a wide ‘U’ with a long, drawn-out bottom.” You’re going to see a leveling off and then, hopefully, as tradition shows, it will go back up again.
PBN: In your position at Sotheby’s, you deal with a lot of higher-end houses. How is that market doing now?
It was affected – I think it was affected because those people in the higher income brackets … were making a conscious decision not to do anything for the time being to see what would happen. I can say, especially in the last three or four weeks, that it seems like somebody has turned the faucet back on.
PBN: There were foreclosure moratoria proposed at the state level and in at least one city early this year. What’s happened with those?
LEYS: My understanding was that they did not go into effect, certainly at the statewide level, which I was glad to see. I was not in favor of putting them into effect and I thought that it would hurt us in the long run as far as banks doing business here. … I have to preface that by saying that I’m certainly not in favor of foreclosures. … I think the smartest thing for us to do in terms of an owner who’s finding themselves in a precarious situation with the bank is to work out a short sale scenario. There’s a big difference between a foreclosure and a short sale. A short sale is when that husband and wife who can’t afford the mortgage anymore and are trying to negotiate with the bank and giving them less than what they owe. And the banks are agreeing to short sales. …
There are options as opposed to just delaying and putting a foreclosure moratorium in place.
PBN: Everybody has been talking a lot about the federal first-time homebuyer tax credit. Is that working?
LEYS: It’s definitely working, but I would love to see it extended by, I’d say, another year. The national Realtor lobby is [working] very strongly to get this extended. Right now, it ends Nov. 30. … If someone goes out today and starts looking for a house, they might not find the house they want to buy until two months from now. It might take them 30 or 45 or 60 days to close on it and that’s going to be putting them right up against that Nov. 30 deadline.
PBN: The condominium market wasn’t hit as hard originally, but has since dropped. What’s happening with condos in Rhode Island?
LEYS: It didn’t initially get hit as hard as the single-family and multifamily categories got hit, as far as the downside of the market. It was the last one to get affected, in my opinion, but now as the single-family and multifamily numbers are picking up, the condos are going to be the last to bounce back.
PBN: How is Rhode Island doing in relation to the other New England states?
LEYS: When [the heads of the state Realtor associations] meet and give reports on our own areas, we’re all hearing the same things: that it’s been a tough market for the last couple years and we’re all bouncing back, going in the right direction. I think Rhode Island, unfortunately, has been much harder hit because the unemployment is double-digits and none of [the other Realtor associations] are experiencing it as high. And I think our distressed and foreclosure sales are a little higher than theirs are now, which is unfortunate.
PBN: How has your membership changed?
LEYS: We did shrink a little bit, but not as much as we were budgeting for. It was a 10 percent drop from the height of the market, when we were over 5,000 members strong. Now, roughly speaking, we’re about a 4,500 member association. •
INTERVIEW
Paul A. Leys
POSITION: President of Rhode Island Association of Realtors; co-owner and managing broker at Gustave White Sotheby’s International Realty
BACKGROUND: After college, Leys volunteered for the U.S. Peace Corps and worked as a water sanitation educator in Ghana for three years. Leys joined Gustave White after he got his real estate license, in 1988. He started out as an agent, got his broker’s license a year later and eventually bought the company with a partner in 2000.
EDUCATION: B.A. in social studies with a minor in business management, Providence College, 1983
FIRST JOB: When he was about 11 years old, Leys delivered The Newport Daily News in his neighborhood.
RESIDENCE: Newport
AGE: 47
