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.
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.
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.”
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 close to 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, she said. At the Sharon Steele Group, Steele said she and her brokers go well beyond helping their clients find a suitable home.
“Specifically at a boutique firm like mine – we do customer service,” she 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.” ••The Department of Business Regulation on March 3rd issued an emergency order suspending Sharon Steele’s broker’s license, pending the outcome of an ongoing investigation of a possible commingling of funds and other allegations. Steele told Providence Business News she expects the case to be resolved by July 1.
