Denise Price
Name: Denise Price
Title: Co-owner, ePlace Real Estate
Age: 43
Experience: 25 years
Denise Price isn’t afraid to start something difficult from scratch. When real estate crashed in 2008, her husband took a job in biotech and the two moved from Denver to Cambridge. While looking for an administrative job, she took a job with a new real estate agency and eventually became co-owner. After walking the Freedom Trail and discovering there was no pop-up children’s book about the history-laden trail, she decided to create one – “Freedom Trail Pop-Up Book of Boston” – despite having no experience in the field.
Q: How did you transition from the Denver real estate market to Cambridge?
A: My husband got a great job in biotech, right in Kendall Square, and I said, “Sure, let’s move out there!” So we moved out here and brought Raja, our miniature schnauzer. I didn’t think it was a good idea to jump right into real estate here because I didn’t know the area. We even sold our cars to come out here. I started looking for an administrative job online and Bill [Scott, principal] was hiring an office manager for ePlace, which was just a year and a half old. Once I came on and started helping him run the business the way it should be run, we started growing it quite a bit and he made me a partner four years ago.
I already had a lot of years selling real estate under my belt. No matter where you go, buyers are the same, sellers are the same. When I first came here, homes weren’t flying off the shelves like they are now. Homes would be on the market 60 to 90 days, which is pretty normal. Back home, properties averaged 120 days on the market. You actually had to market a home and not just put it on MLS. I would help people through those scenarios of where their home didn’t sell and it had been over average market time. I’d say, “Let’s figure out what we need to do.”
Q: Do you sell homes in addition to managing the office?
A: Yes. Mostly I manage but Bill and I have recently started to sell a little bit. We did a few deals last year. We’re considering opening it up a little more. We haven’t done that all these years, but our agents have matured and our growth has happened organically. We’ve shown them how to start from zero and become a six-figure agent. We really feel like there is room for us to go and sell again. We’re just listing a place in Beacon Hill for $2.7 million and just sold a place in Concord, so we’re doing some, but not a lot.
We really push our agents to work with their – and I don’t like this term, but it is what it is – sphere of influence. Who are your friends and where do they live and who do they know who is selling property? Relationship sales is much easier than cold-calling. Most of our business is Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, Arlington, Malden.
Q: Creating and producing a pop-up book sounds like a lot of work. Can you talk a little about the process?
A: It was. Pop-up books are one of the last hand-made products. There are 280 pieces in it that all had to be hand-glued together. You can imagine the price of that production. And I’m not a big pop-up book author who gets 150,000 books made in their first run. I had to beg to get 5,000 produced. I never set out to do this, to become an independent publisher. That wasn’t the goal. I thought there would be more interest in it than what the publishers said. There were some publishers interested in it, but again, pop up books are such a small part of the industry that even some of the publishers around here hadn’t dealt with them before. So it scared them and when the pricing came in, it was not what they wanted. It’s hard for publishers to stay in business these days. It’s changed a lot even in the last six years, since I started the book.
But I thought Boston needed a pop-up book. I mean, when you go to San Francisco or Washington D.C., they have pop-up books. That’s what I would buy for my nieces and nephews when we would travel. For Boston to have such a placeholder in the beginning of the American Revolution, for us to have an amazing historic preservation push and all these buildings still exist and to not have a pop-up book was astonishing to me. So I thought it needed one at all costs. It took five and a half years to figure out how to engineer it to pop up and learn how to illustrate it digitally, which allows it to be reproduced.
The book is my love letter to the city of Boston. I’ve sold 2,400 copies so far, which is encouraging. The average independent publisher sells fewer than 100 copies. I plan to sell out completely in about three years and then that’s it. I’m done. I’ve been approached to do some more. I’m entertaining a few ideas.
Top Five Most Difficult Locations Price Has Sold Homes:
- A 165-home development near an open sewer plant.
- A 287-home development along high voltage power lines.
- A 428-home development beneath the Buckley Air Force Base flight path.
- An 86-home development adjacent to the National Chemical Weapons disposal site.
- A 218-home development on the brownfields of the former Lowry AFB.
