Brentwood realty company leaves franchise behind

Independence offers firm total flexibility

By SUSAN LEATHERS

Brentwood Home Page

One of Brentwood’s largest real estate firms last week changed its identity and the way it does business. Realty Executives Fine Homes’ broker/owner David Coulton announced he was taking the company in a new direction and not renewing his franchise with Realty Executives International. Instead, the firm becomes RealtyTrust Residential LLC, an independent company.

Corrected 10 a.m. Tuesday

Independence offers firm total flexibility

By SUSAN LEATHERS

Brentwood Home Page

One of Brentwood’s largest real estate firms last week changed its identity and the way it does business.

Realty Executives Fine Homes’ broker/owner David Coulton announced he was taking the company in a new direction and not renewing his franchise with Realty Executives International. Instead, the firm becomes RealtyTrust Residential LLC, an independent company.

The company has 85 full-time agents. At a staff meeting Aug. 4 in the company’s Westgate Commons headquarters called to announce the change, Coulton had new business cards, new signs and new websites ready for each of them. “I decided to invest significantly in the future of my agents,” he said. “All they had to do was walk in and they walked out with the tools they need to do their jobs.”

But it’s not cards or signs or the name that Coulton is determined to change, he explained. He said he seriously began thinking about the company’s future in 2007 when the economy seriously started to take a downturn. “Everything changed so drastically,” he said of the real estate market as well as technology.

He began doing research. He determined that to succeed in the future, “I need to be able to move fast any place I want to go in the market,” he said, mentioning social media and the Internet.

“Franchises are expensive and everything is changing so fast, I knew I could be more nimble on my own. I need to be able to make a change in two weeks not two years,” he said.

“It wasn’t as important in 2005. But now agents, even experienced agents, want coaching. Diana Richards has been named head of technology and coaching for the firm. “We have that onsite. Agents don’t want to set through webinars,” he noted. There will be training opportunities multiple times a week “and that goes on forever.”

“Technology has gotten so complex that agents are overwhelmed. We want to make it easy to navigate, whether they are working on their cell phone or computer,” he said.

Coulton noted that RealtyTrust plans to double its agent count in Williamson County and expand to southern Davidson County over the next year through strategic acquisitions or mergers with other real estate firms.