Realtor plays national role with a local perspective

This is the sixth in a series of 12 PBN articles focusing on the backgrounds, challenges and successes of some of the area’s most influential and interesting business women. The series began Sept. 12.
As the owner of a successful Rhode Island real-estate firm and advocate for her industry nationally, Sharon Steele has thrived by taking a long-term perspective on the traditionally cyclical business.
She’s the owner of the Sharon Steele Group, a boutique real estate agency in Providence. Steele founded the firm in 1997 in a small office in the Jewelry District, after working 16 years as a broker for the high-end powerhouse Residential Properties Ltd. Since 2003, the Sharon Steele Group has operated on the ground-floor of a South Main Street condominium that Steele owns. The business is particularly active in the state’s affluent communities.
Steele is also a past president of the Rhode Island Association of Realtors, and continues to be a leader in the National Association of Realtors. For the past five years, she has been the chairwoman of the national association’s professional standards committee. She is in line to become the association’s vice president in the New England region in 2009.
In addition, next year, Steele will become a liaison to the national association’s law and policy group. As one of 11 such liaisons across the country, she will act as a conduit of information between the association’s executive leadership and nine committees working to shape national real estate policy, including the committees for legal action, risk management and professional standards.
For the past five years, Steele has been a member of the national association’s political involvement committee, serving as a liaison between the industry group and Rhode Island’s congressional delegation.
In that role, Steele has a front-row seat on work being done in Washington to address problematic practices in subprime mortgage lending that have resulted this year in an avalanche of foreclosures across the country and contributed to an international credit crunch.
Currently, Sen. Jack Reed is involved in an effort to increase the income-eligibility limits of federal mortgage lender Fanny Mae. Steele thinks that would have a positive impact in Rhode Island, where many who are hoping to escape from onerous adjustable-rate mortgages and refinance on better terms currently exceed Fanny Mae’s income guidelines.
Predatory lending became widespread in recent years as unscrupulous mortgage lenders – many without proper accreditations – preyed on consumers who should not have been extended credit and didn’t understand the loan terms they were signing on to, she said.
The crisis has become a drag on the nation’s economy as real-estate values in many markets have dropped and many major financial institutions have experienced big losses on mortgage-backed securities, causing a tightening of financial lending across the globe.
And yet, Steele contended that the subprime mortgage crisis has not hurt the average property owner in Rhode Island. The vast majority of people who bought real estate in the state in recent years used traditional loan products, and the average property in the state is more valuable than it was a decade ago, even with the recent depreciation in the market, she said.
“The headlines, I’m sorry to tell you, don’t substantiate the story,” Steele said. “That’s not to say that in any marketplace there aren’t specific sellers trying to get numbers that are aggressive. But people are learning to be more realistic. And people today in terms of housing equity are many, many times better off than they were, say, in 1995.”
In fact, real estate activity is brisk in communities like East Greenwich, Barrington and Providence’s East Side, and real estate prices have not dropped as considerably as they have in communities with similar demographics in neighboring states, where market speculation inflated home prices more than occurred here, she said.
In any event, Steele said she sees the recent dip in the market as part of a historical fluctuation that ultimately trends upward.
“The housing market is cyclical – it always has been,” she said. “The state has a steady climb and it levels, and a steady climb and it levels. What we are blessed with in Rhode Island is that we are sandwiched between two very expensive states – Massachusetts and Connecticut – so that our median house price, even if it is moderating, is a much better situation than in the states on either side of us.”
Steele counts herself among a relatively small group of full-time Realtors who account for the vast majority of real estate transactions in Rhode Island.
In 2002, when she served as president of the Rhode Island Association of Realtors, Steele commissioned a report which concluded that not quite 10 percent of those who called themselves real estate agents in the state accounted for 90 percent of all transactions. Those real estate professionals generate the majority of their business through referrals from happy clients, Steele said.
At the Sharon Steele Group, she said, she and her agents go well beyond helping their clients find a suitable home. “Specifically at a boutique firm like mine, we do customer service,” Steele said.
“We help people get their kids into schools, we help them become assimilated into their communities, we introduce them to the Philharmonic, to their neighbors. We literally are the link that brings that person in and makes them a wonderful contributor to our neighborhood.” •

To read about other Business Women, in the rest of the PBN series, click here.

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