Consultant Fares Well in Her Real Estate Niche : Bonnie Benton’s home-based business relies on a powerful computer and the right software for the job.
Bonnie Benton is a consultant. But unlike many of her peers, whose self-employment began when companies cut them loose during the recession, Benton launched her business by choice in the midst of a boom.
With a background as a real estate agent and sales and marketing strategist for a number of major home builders and developers--including Mission Viejo Co. and J.M. Peters Co.--Benton jumped the corporate ship in 1987 to start her own business. And despite a four-year recession that has ravaged Southern California’s development industry, she says she hasn’t looked back.
She has survived the economic crunch by “being lucky enough to have some pretty good clients to start with, companies that realized they needed more information as times got bad. And my background enabled me to be flexible as the economy and clients’ needs changed.”
Benton also did something that many would-be entrepreneurs fail to do: She identified a niche and filled it well. She did so with a plethora of professional contacts, a willingness to get out and talk to the people who buy and sell real estate, and a powerful personal computer linked by telephone to numerous commercial databases.
“Too many small businesses don’t establish a well-defined target market, and if you try to spread yourself over a huge area you won’t have the expertise to do it all,” said Judee Slack, a Westminster tax consultant and president of the local chapter of the National Assn. of Women Business Owners.
There are many much bigger real estate analysis companies than Benton’s in Southern California. But, working from a home office in Laguna Niguel, Benton sets herself apart by tackling what she calls “the extraneous, odd studies that a client probably wouldn’t get from the larger, more generalist type of consulting firm.”
Benton has prospered by giving her clients highly customized and personalized service and by offering a unique perspective on the market. Her clients--builders, developers, banks and other marketing and consulting firms--deal largely in the new-home industry. To that, Benton brings an understanding of the interplay between the resale and new-home markets.
“Most people in the new-home industry ignore the resale market, and they don’t look very far away from their location. I want to give my clients an even better picture of what the market really is in terms of competition and price.”
So a Benton study is characterized by an analysis of new-home competition on a broad regional basis and by an in-depth look at what is going on in the same region’s resale market.
Pulling up resale data, she said, gives her the ability to tell her clients things like the ethnic makeup of the area from which customers are likely to come, the age of the existing housing stock, the size of lots and homes in the area, and the prices of homes that buyers might consider as alternatives to the client’s product.
All of that helps the client decide exactly what to build and how to focus advertising, she said.
A builder planning a typical 1990s tract of 2,500-square-foot homes on 3,000-square-foot lots, for example, needs to know if there are four other new-homes tracts in the area and what those projects offer in terms of price, lot size and product style.
But the builder also needs to know if all of the surrounding existing homes are small, 20 years old and built on big 6,000- to 7,000-square-foot lots, she said.
“That tells you that your project, if you build it as planned, will be way too big for the area. The people who might buy won’t want to live in that neighborhood,” Benton said. “And people in the neighborhood who might be tempted to move up might decide that it’s less expensive to add on to their existing homes and keep their big lots.”
Benton said that the hardest part of running her own business has been time management. In the early days, she said, she would often burn herself out by putting in 12- and 15-hour days. Even now she figures that she averages 65 hours a week.
Her smartest move? “I forced myself to take the time to learn how to use my computer, and I keep abreast of the software that is useful in what I do. It’s what keeps me in business, because with it I can do the work of three people.”
Benton said she now it tackling one of the toughest decisions of her career. She has reached the limits of what she can do as a one-woman firm and must decide whether to draw a line and go no further or to expand--which would mean hiring a full-time staff and diluting the personal service she now gives.
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