It’s safe to say Judy Davey is house-trained.

Davey spends her waking hours as a real estate broker for Windermere Real Estate. It’s a job she moved into shortly after migrating from southern California. When she set up shop, her pets followed.

When she answers the phone at her Port Orchard office an English parakeet chirps happily in the background. Buddy perches in a cage, just above and behind her chair.

Davey’s mutt dog Sandy lies at her feet, instinctively drawing its paws away from the chair wheels that constantly roll from computer desk to paper-filled desk and back.

A stray cat outside, now known by the 30 other agents and brokers at the Windermere building as Stuart, has stayed close for the last few years.

He’s not a house cat.

“He doesn’t come inside,” Davey said. “I’ve never been able to persuade him.”

Her husband Carl built Stuart a home in the blackberries behind Windermere. For anyone told Davey is also president of the Kitsap Humane Society, it doesn’t come as a surprise.

The corner office has all the creature comforts, but to do her job well, Davey must spend as much time away from it as possible. A dog-eared appointment helps make her life efficient.

“You don’t get paid unless you produce,” she says. “In eight years as an agent I have never come in with nothing to do.”

Tour Day

Thursday morning is the time to satisfy intense nosiness otherwise known as curiosity, also known as Tour Day. It’s a chance for those representing sellers to showcase their newest listings to other agents who are out there on behalf of buyers.

It starts in an upstairs room of the Hi-Joy bowling alley There’s a quick rundown of the seven houses on the itinerary, a few industry announcements and they’re out the door.

Tour Day has its ups and downs — other than all the stairs. Davey says the houses she and her clients are interested in she’s usually seen already.

“The question is, does anybody I’m working with want anything I’ve seen,” she says. “Today? No. But there might be someone next week who will.”

Davey, 51, brings her own likes and dislikes to the tour but is more interested in learning a wide range of prices and features for those prospective buyers.

She’s toured countless families through countless homes.

“Everybody is different,” she says. “A lot of time both members of the family aren’t looking at the same things so you must really know who to take direction from. You learn to listen at what’s being said. That’s how you get along and succeed.”

On this day, Davey answers numerous questions about the three-day, 60-mile AVON breast cancer walk she was on the week before. Yes, her feet have blisters. Her team of four raised $8,000. Yes, she plans to do it again next year.

Like a dry pub-crawl, Davey and her cohorts buzz through anywhere from four to 15 houses on tour day. With the speed of a scavenger hunt and in constant motion they look in every room. No step is wasted. Glances sweep over corners, carpets, counters, window frames, seeking wall cracks and any possible fault.

The agents take away first impressions — the same ones that prospective buyers will have. They leave behind business cards with the hopeful wish of marking territory.

Later, anytime before the next meeting, they will write down what they think the house would actually sell for. Those figures are collected and compared with the current asking price, which may adjust accordingly.

At the last house of the day, food is often served. Sometimes 20 to 25 agents take the tour, creating a strange caravan as the group careens from location to location. Today, because August is a “notorious vacation month,” there are about 10, and there is way too much good Mexican food.

“There’s a theory that if there’s food you’ll stay longer to look over the house,” Davey said. “It is true, but I’m not too sure that’s always a good thing.”

Market knowledge

“That place is the pits,” Davey says, scrolling through a too short list of homes that meets the desires of a couple referred to her the day before. “Some places you know after only one visit that you wouldn’t want to sell anyone.”

And if it’s over-priced, the sin is doubled. If a house is on the market a long time, there’s usually only one reason.

“This is a price-driven market so the first thing you look at is, has that price been changed. It’s not a good use of the agents time to work on an over-priced listing.”

Still, prices fluctuate through a myriad of reasons without rhyme.

“The market is always changing. Just when you think you know what you’re doing somebody changes the guide posts.”

For instance, in the last 18 months the Kitsap Peninsula has become a seller’s market. There’s been less new construction and with today’s low interest rates, much more refinancing.

And people still want to move to the area.

The business is cyclical. The majority of sales and houses going on the market are during the spring and summer. That’s the time that determines whether an agent is going to have a barren or fruitful year.

Competing interests

Real Estate agents are usually independent contractors who must work together for success. There are two sides to each sale. One agent or broker represents the seller: the other the buyer.

In an industry driven 100 percent by commissions, 6 percent of a sale is standard in Washington state. That is split 50-50 between the agents on both sides. Davey says Windermere gets a percentage of her 3 percent. How much depends on a sliding scale of sales that can get as generous as 80-20 in favor of the agent.

So on a $180,000 house sale, Davey could make between $2,700 and $4,300.

Davey loves the flexibility of being able to set her own hours and how much she wants to get done. Still, she says, it is hard fighting the urge to finish the sale and get to the next one, and the next one.

“There’s a tremendous amount of freedom. That is tremendously exciting to me, that you are the shaper of your own fate. I can always say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but it is a challenge to live a balanced life because you can work as long as you want.

“I’m really bad about talking vacations and yes, if I have a choice between time with my family and closing a sale on a Saturday, I’m sorry to say it’s the sale more often than not.”

Today, Davey shakes hands with two people she has helped to sell their homes. It is likely the last time she will see either of them, though one’s closing has hit a paperwork snag, something to do with the lender needing proof of income and security. It’s not a deal-breaker but the house won’t close on the proposed day.

“You have to understand early on that you cannot will a transaction to close; anything can happen,” Davey says. “When you have a flip you step back and look at what else you could have done and 99 percent of the time there isn’t anything.”

She gets a curt phone call from another agent. They’re friends. It’s business.

A couple Davey represents has discovered late in the game that their credit is not as good as it was thought to be. The deal is likely to fall through, as Davey describes it, because the couple went into debt consolidation a few years ago with the wrong company. Or they took on a generally frowned on method of lessening their debt

It’s complex and made worse by the fact that the couple has had two other potential buys fall through over the last six months for completely unrelated reasons.

“This is the part of the job that gives you ulcers,” Davey says. “The buyers are beside themselves because they’ve been looking for so long. And to be stopped because of what they thought was a good thing is just traumatic.”

They’ve had good credit since then. If this fails they will have to wait another year.
Right now there’s little time to dwell. Another call comes in.

“You can spread agents out to those who are never here, those who are always here and all those in between,” Davey said. “I would put myself as always here. I’m driven.”

(Temple A. Stark is a free-lance writer living in Port Orchard. Reach him at writer@harbornet.com).