Language, the Key : Fluency in Many Tongues Can Unlock Sales for Southland Real Estate Agents
Mike Malik grew up in Israeli and European environments where people spoke many languages. He is fluent in English, Hebrew and Romanian--the native language of his parents--and he understands German.
“The only language I didn’t care for was Italian,” he said. “Now, I’m sorry I didn’t learn it.”
The reason is that Malik sells real estate for a living, and language skills are like gold in today’s competitive Los Angeles real estate market. Another asset in the business is his wife, Linda, who is his partner in the Coldwell Banker real estate office in Canoga Park. She is a “Valley girl” who is fluent in English and Spanish.
The real estate market in the Los Angeles area is one of the most ethnically diverse in the country, with the buyers including recent immigrants from the four corners of the globe and foreigners who are not settling here but want to own a piece of the rich property that is up for grabs.
The number of foreign-born people living in the Los Angeles metropolitan area totaled 1.7 million at the time of the 1980 census and has increased greatly since then. The Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that 1.02 million refugees and other legal and illegal immigrants have entered the United States through Los Angeles County between 1980 and 1988, although there is no way of knowing how many stayed here.
Real estate companies are going all-out to ensure that they cover the ethnic market niches and to make it as comfortable as possible for people from many cultures to do business with them. Many small Los Angeles area agencies are owned by members of various ethnic groups, and they have long attracted business from their own ethnic communities.
Gary Sakata, owner of the Sakamoto Hideo agency in the Little Tokyo area, said a large percentage of his customers are Japanese or Americans of Japanese ancestry. “They come to us on a word-of-mouth or referral basis,” he said. “Usually it is because they have relatives or friends who have dealt with us.”
Melvin Wong, the franchise owner of the Century 21 A.C.R.E.S. Realtors in Monterey Park, also said many Asians “come to us” from referrals. Most of the agents his outfit employs are from Chinese and Southeast Asian ethnic backgrounds.
Denis L. Bolen, Coldwell Banker’s senior vice president and regional sales manager in Woodland Hills, decided in 1984 that there was no reason that the large real estate company, a Sears, Roebuck subsidiary, should not compete hard for the business of ethnic group members.
“I saw there was a need here,” he said. “There were more and more ethnic groups moving here. It is like a little United Nations. I thought there was some business out there for us.”
Real estate is very “subtle. . . . There are a lot of nuances,” he explained. Some immigrants assimilate rapidly and are soon very comfortable in an English-speaking environment, he said. But “it may take others a generation or two. These people may feel more comfortable doing business with their own countrymen and in their own language,” he said.
Bolen began to seek out bilingual Coldwell Banker agents from various ethnic groups to put together a network for customers who wanted to work with someone who spoke their language. The network initially consisted of agents who spoke Arabic, Japanese and Armenian, he said.
24 Languages Included
The agency advertised the service in ethnic, community newspapers, including a toll-free number for customers to call to get an agent. Often, in the entire course of the resulting deals, “not one word of English was spoken,” he said.
The Coldwell Banker International Language Services now includes 24 languages. More than two dozen agents speak Spanish and about half a dozen speak Farsi, the language of immigrants from Iran. Filipino customers who do not want to negotiate in Spanish or English can be referred to agents who speak Tagalog, the most commonly spoken language in the Philippines.
The ability to confer in the language in which he is most confident was one reason that Igal Hever, owner of a San Fernando Valley closet conversion company, chose to work with Mike Malik in buying his Chatsworth home. Hever, a Jewish native of Costa Rica, speaks Spanish and English, but he found Malik’s knowledge of Hebrew most helpful. “I am better in Hebrew than English,” Hever said.
Suzanne Wong, a Coldwell Banker agent who speaks Cantonese and Mandarin, said she is working with a Chinese client who “speaks beautiful English,” but they converse frequently in Mandarin. “Sometimes, it is just more natural for them,” she said.
Even if they understand English, clients often feel that they may be missing something important if the negotiations are not conducted in their native language, said Twee Haydostean, a Coldwell Banker sales agent fluent in Vietnamese and Indonesian.
But language is only one issue, she said. Because of cultural differences, some Asians interpret real estate sales tactics in the United States as too aggressive. “They feel that Westerners try to push them too much to make a decision too fast,” she said.
Some real estate companies are aggressively expanding their reach overseas to win the confidence of potential immigrants and foreigners looking for investments.
Coldwell Banker is opening a Tokyo franchise. And some upscale Westside agencies--including Fred Sands Realty, Jon Douglas Co. and Merrill Lynch Realty’s Beverly Hills division--have also set their sights on the wealthy Japanese who have recently turned their attention to U.S. residential real estate.
Two weeks ago, the Merrill Lynch division in Beverly Hills was a co-sponsor of a television broadcast for a Tokyo audience that originated live from Beverly Hills. The show was an opportunity for the Merrill Lynch division to show Japanese shoppers one of its most prestigious listings--a $9.5-million estate that at different times was owned by actress Barbara Stanwyck and hair-care expert Vidal Sassoon.
“The early results on the live broadcast were extremely encouraging,” said Richard (Rick) Merrill, president of the Beverly Hills division.
That kind of direct marketing to Japan is likely to be repeated under an innovative marketing agreement with D.S.Y. Limited Partnership and Fuji Sankei Living Services Direct Marketing. Both are Japanese companies. Fuji Sankei, which owns newspapers, catalogues and television stations, is one of Japan’s leading marketing and media concerns.
Merrill Lynch-Beverly Hills will expand its advertising in Japan to include newspapers, magazines and catalogues and is exploring the use of billboards and other media, said Merrill who recently attended a marketing conference in Japan.
Jon Douglas, president of Jon Douglas Co., also recently toured Asia.
