Kimberly Allard-Moccia, 2010’s Massachusetts Realtor of the Year, remembers well her first homebuying experience – mostly, that her real estate agent didn’t seem to pay much attention to what she wanted.

Later, after successfully selling her own property, Allard-Moccia started in the real estate business professionally. In the decade-plus since, she’s plunged in with vigor, racking up a number of special designations to enhance her expertise, and staying vocal about the major issues affecting her industry.

Kimberly Allard-Moccia

Title: Broker/Owner, Realtor, Century 21; Braintree

Age: 45

Experience: 12 years

The most noticeable things about you are your extra specializations in technology, environmental and finance expertise – what motivated you to get the extra designations?

To start at the beginning: A real estate agent is a person who has a license, and the degrees of licensing are agent and broker, and that’s pretty much 24 hours of classroom time … [But] I heard somebody make a joke that said, ‘You’re going to take 24 hours’ worth of classroom time and you’re going to be out there and sell somebody’s biggest asset, but yet you need more than triple that in hours to cut my hair.’ … In the Realtor community, we offer designation and educational opportunities for these professionals to show a continued commitment to the industry.

So these extra specializations help the process, and reinforce the usefulness of having a Realtor helping the homebuyer?

Yes, proving your usefulness, and being able to show your benefit in the transaction. You used to just put people in your car and show them around to properties… now there are so many things of concern. Buyers have concerns about school systems, they have concerns about the quality of the neighborhood they’ve living in, they have environmental concerns about radon, lead paint, energy – buyers that are coming on to the market are concerned about the costs to run some of these homes.

Buyers are certainly able to go to the Internet and find something they’re interested in. But is a good fit for them or not? We’re really like the psychologists of home buying, because we help them understand what they want, what they need, and if in fact those are even the same thing. If you’re just the person that opens the doors and shows property, you’re really not providing a service.

So what do you think are the biggest issues affecting Realtors these days?

An issue that’s out there is the pending foreclosures and short sales…. the [National Association of Realtors] lobbies on behalf of homeowners for the right to use and sell and freely transfer property, so what that means is we’re acutely aware of all of the things that impact homeownership, and one of those right now is the ability for people, if they need to sell their house as a short sale, to do so swiftly and efficiently and properly.

There’s plenty of buyers out there, they just can’t get into these homes because of some red tape that the banks haven’t quite worked out yet. So we’ve worked closely with some of the big players, the Wells Fargos and the Bank of Americas, to try to break down some of these barriers.

Bankers themselves often say that they’re hamstrung by the upheaval in new regulations, and that there’s only so much they can do in the current situation.

I might be sitting in the ugly seat by saying this, but we’ve been looking at this animal for five to six years and it’s no longer new to anybody.

The problem is when you’ve got a property that’s been on the market for 12 to 14 months as a short sale, and you’ve got four offers pending on it, and the bank tries to say that those offers aren’t market value. Well, who [else] determines market value, but the buyers? And if all the offers are in the same vicinity, and the bank is counter offering $50,000 higher than the house is on the market for, and at the same time, another division of that very same bank starts the foreclosure proceedings? Where’s the problem here?

The banks, whether they need local representatives to make decisions out in the field, or whether they need to reach out and grab the hands of the Realtor association a little bit tighter and pull us in and say, “help us,” you know I’m not quite sure what the answer is, but I know, I can speak from personal experience, that the buyers are there, they’re qualified, they’re ready to buy and they will pay market value.

Allard-Moccia’s Top Five Professional Designations

• Graduate of the Realtor Institute: A series of courses including commercial, leasing and renting, and land permit use.
• Certified Buyers Representative: Education for those representing buyers’ interests.
• Certified Finance Specialist: Helps Realtors fully understand borrowers’ loans and the properties those loans help borrowers acquire.
• E-Pro: With reams of property data online, the E-Pro Realtor helps clients organize the data and find out how it applies to them.
• GREEN, the National Association of Realtors’ environmental designation to help buyers understand environmental and energy issues related to their property.