Jeffrey Morgenstern has spent not one but two careers backstage at the opera – he started out working in stage lighting and theater design, and had a gig with a Boston company before transitioning to the ongoing soap opera of the real estate market.

He’s now worked for more than 25 years as a sales manager for Coldwell Banker. Morgenstern oversees Coldwell locations in Lincoln – where he was a long-time manager – and Weston.

Jeffrey Morgenstern

Title: Sales Manager, Coldwell Banker; Weston

Age: 54

Experience: 27 years

What was the appeal of taking over the Weston management gig?

On the Route 20 belt, there is sort of a ‘Go West Young Man’ theory – if you can’t find what you want in Weston, go [west] to Wayland. If you can’t find what you want in Wayland, let’s go [west] to Sudbury. So I had a strong familiarity and I think that was the reason the company asked me to come. This has been an award-winning office. There were a couple of years where this was the number one office out of the company network of 90 offices.

Real estate is very local, sometimes even neighborhood by neighborhood. How do you learn the quirks of a new town?

More of it’s about talking with the agents. I can look at statistics until I’m blue in the face, but that doesn’t really help me with understanding what a CEO of a major corporation is trying to achieve, and how they can achieve it. When you’re dealing with high-profile people that are moving around, they don’t always want everybody to know what they’re doing at the time that you have to do it. So there’s a lot of confidentiality things that come into play, and I find that [at] the higher end of the market, the more paramount the issue of confidentiality [becomes]. It’s about understanding what a seller’s trying to accomplish, and why they’re trying to accomplish it … Sometimes that can be a challenge. Take the example of a middle-management homeowner who has decided for one reason or another to leave the company that he’s in, and he has a job offer, but his boss lives four houses away. So does he put the house on the market, and all of a sudden the boss says, ‘Hey, where are you moving?’ So it’s those kinds of things that we have to understand so that we can help the client get to where the client wants to get to.

Does that affect the way you market a property?

I truly believe that you get the highest and best price the more people know about the house. It can stagnate the marketing somewhat if we have to have an office exclusive or a non-MLS exclusive. It can affect how marketing is done and how quickly we can expedite things for homeowners. If someone says, ‘I want to move and I want to move really quickly, but you can only do half the things you usually do to market that house,’ it’s like trying to hang wallpaper with one hand behind your back sometimes.

Do you find it’s still tough to bring sellers and buyers together? Are high-end sellers stuck on getting a certain value for their house?

It’s wonderful when they understand what they need to make, but if the buyer’s perception isn’t equal to that, then they may have to wait for a stronger market. It’s interesting, though, if you say a stronger market, the market is up in terms of units sold in Weston, year-over-year. We’re up about 12 percent to 13 percent in the number of homes sold. The median price has declined about 12 percent, also, but because we’ve sold more houses, there’s more activity in the marketplace. Somebody in the office referred to it as a heartbeat … some of these [higher-end] communities that are affected by financial services could be positively impacted on the high-end this year, because the stock market’s done pretty well this year.

You had an unusual career prior to entering the real estate sector. What made you take the leap?

From 1975 to about 1985, I was in production management and lighting design for ballet and opera and rock and roll, pretty much any live entertainment. If you think about that lifestyle, it’s great between the ages of 20 and 30. There’s a lot of buses, a lot of hotels, a lot of dark places, a lot of dingy places … I started to think I wanted to settle in Boston again. I was talking to a friend, and I realized I didn’t know the first thing about getting a mortgage, about anything. So I started taking some classes, end up taking the real estate licensing exam, and … I got hooked. I truly like helping people get to where they want to get to. One of the first houses I ever sold, it was to a Vietnam vet, up in Lynn–I think it was 106 Rockaway Road–and this gentleman was crying in my car. He never thought he’d own a house.

Morgenstern’s Top 5 Tips For Learning Your Way Around A New Market: 

• Visit town hall. Learn the different departments and who the people are.
• Interview your agents. Understand what they know and love about the town they live in.
• Understand commuting routes.
• Learn the inventory.
• Find the best sandwich shop around. Building relationships in the community is huge.