Ed Ridolfi is a real estate lifer, with hours spent after school at his mother’s New Jersey real estate office leading straight into a real estate career. A New England convert, earlier this year he left Coldwell Banker to join Bean Group, a leading New Hampshire brokerage that has Massachusetts in its sights.

The group recently was named to the INC’s 5,000 fastest-growing companies list, ranking 31 in the national real estate category – the only New England brokerage to do so.

Ed Ridolfi

Title: Director of Regional Development, Bean Group; New Hampshire

Age: 51

Experience: 29

So how did you get into real estate?

I joke that I started in real estate when I was 13. I got my license in 1982. I like to joke that my last job before real estate was McDonald’s. And not as management.

With all that experience, what led you make the leap to Bean Group?

I saw this opportunity, particularly in Essex County – there’s a couple of voids in the business right now. One of them is an actual market share void. So you have Coldwell Banker with a superior market share, and you have this whole sea of everybody else. And occasionally in certain markets you have someone in-between. On the South Shore it’s Jack Conway – great operation. In Suffolk County, it’s Hammond, pretty much. In Essex County there’s really no one. So there’s an opportunity there. But one of the voids that really needs to be filled in our industry – there are very few personal, dynamic, owner-leaders that engender this personal loyalty. In Massachusetts there was DeWolfe, Carson, people who came in and created something out of nothing. King Davis, same thing out in Haverhill. Just by virtue of their personal leadership and vision, they created stuff and people followed them, and they were proud to work for them. I worked for brokers like that in New Jersey. Dave Shaw, for example. If he said to a roomful of people, “I need you, you, and you to help me move this building,” we’d jump up. “Let’s go! Where do you want it?” Real estate sales people have been going through tough times. But one of the other things that has been missing is that feeling that I belong to a culture, or I work for someone that I’m proud of, that brings meaning to the work. Beyond the satisfaction of helping buyers and sellers and beyond the need to make money, there’s this other component, and that’s largely been homogenized out of our business. There are individual sales managers in companies that people have this loyalty to, but their operating sphere is pretty small. There are companies in the area of Essex County that have multi-office, but the owners also tend to be players in the market. But the old sort of notion that existed in the 70s, that I would be King Davis and people would follow me, that sort of thing has gone away….and the pendulum is ready to shift back.

Unlike a lot of real estate companies, you’re in expansion mode right now. What’s the plan for the company going forward?

There’s a lot of work to do – it’s like digging a trench. It’s work, but I know how to do it. I’ve been doing recruiting for a long time. In a really good year, if you recruit 15 to 25 people, that’s significant. Since March, I’ve hired 17 agents to this office. When [I’ve hired 20 or more agents before] really only 8 or 9 would be experienced agents, the rest were new agents that you bring into the business. Our model doesn’t allow for new agents. So since March, we’ve attracted 17 experienced agents, which is more than anybody else that I know of…We’re likely to be 12 offices in the next few years. Now, when I say offices, our office model is completely different. We don’t take high-visibility locations…our offices are more way stations for agents [which] allows us to expand more quickly.

With that kind of approach, it seems like you’d have to focus all your marketing on the web. But how do you compete online with big brokerages which have a lot more money to spend on making sites, apps and tools for agents?

There’s very little new in real estate [technology]. What we offer is a different mix of services and compensation. The web component is a big piece of that. If you were to put in “New Hampshire real estate” in Google, Bean Group comes up number one or two consistently, all the time. When we opened in March, and I did that search on Newburyport real estate, we were on page 19 of Google. Have you ever been to page 19 of search results? You have to be really bored. But [right now] we’re on page one, number eight….what [Michael Bean’s] done in New Hampshire is starting to work in Massachusetts.

Has the current market environment been a challenge in getting people to come over?

To some degree, but there’s also been opportunity. Since the market turned in ’05, I’ve been preaching, “There’s no good news or bad news. There’s just news.” If you’re in real estate for a long enough time, you recognize that what happens is periodically, the rules change…What worked for a real estate brokerage when I got started in 1982 stopped working in the 90s…What worked in the beginning of the 21st century doesn’t work anymore. Or as well, I should say – there’s always going to be vestiges of things that have survived. The standard model for a real estate company, whether you’re a huge one or a small one, is not really viable anymore. It’s very difficult to maintain high expenses in a real estate company. The profit margin on a big broker has gotten very thin, on the old model. One of the things that’s beautiful about the Bean Group model is that structure doesn’t exist, that expense burden doesn’t exist. Which allows the company to do other things….I’m confident that sometime, five years onward form now, you’ll see a lot more company models around the Bean Group model.

Ed Ridolfi’s Top 5 “I Words” Of Real Estate Success:

• Intelligence – to recognize what a client’s need is.
• Initiative – to turn your experience into concrete recommendations.
• Independence – to work at sea, without supervision.
• Illumination – “Particularly now, when there’s so much information out there. If you’re good at what you do, you illuminate it in a way that attracts people to you. All great sales people have that.”
• Intensity – to see a deal through, and protect your client’s interests.

This article has been changed from an earlier version which incorrectly spelled Mr. Ridolfi’s name. The spelling has been updated and is now correct. We apologize for the error.