Bruce Taylor and Cheryl Eidinger-Taylor
Title: Co-broker owners of ERA Key Realty Services
Age: 67 and 47
Experience: 40 and 23 years
After many hectic years as a commercial real estate executive, Bruce Taylor thought it might be time to settle down and open a small residential office. Twenty-some years later, he and his wife Cheryl have transformed that four-agent brokerage into a successful chain, with 14 offices across the state and almost half a billion dollars in volume. The couple are also avid sailors who keep a 25-foot catamaran.
Q: How did you get into real estate in the first place?
BT: I actually started out working for a real estate investment trust, back in the early ’70s. … So I learned the real estate business – with somebody else’s money, which is a good thing – but really at an in-depth kind of a high level, as the company that owned all these [different] properties. We did condo development in Florida, we did shopping centers in New York state, condo conversions. But I was running all over the country with that business, and I said that’s enough. So I decided to open a residential real estate office. And it’s grown from a little office with four agents to 14 offices with … what is it now?
CET: About 375.
Q: Bruce, you basically came into the residential side as a broker. Do you remember the first house you sold?
BT: I actually don’t. At the time I was trying to establish the company – I did sell for eight or nine years – but I remember very few of the sales. There are one or two – I used to challenge the agents to work with walk-ins, and I remember I sold a house to the guy who used to bring the bottled water to the office. Anybody who came in, I figured “I’m going to get this guy.”
CET: And the guy for the copy machine.
BT: Yeah. And the lady who sold the newspaper – that one took me a year, because I had to get her finances straightened out.
Q: How did you guys meet?
BT: Cheryl came to work for me as an agent.
CET: Way back in 1990, a few years into the business.
Q: So you’ve been in from the ground up. Did you know you were looking at a good thing way back when?
CET: No idea. No, I had been a stay-at-home mom for a little while. I had been out looking at homes with an agent and asked her how she liked her job. So she said, “Oh, you should come talk to my boss.” Back then, I didn’t know all you had to do was breathe to become a Realtor. They hired me on the spot! I thought I was special. [I had a corporate background, and] as we were growing as a real estate company, I was seeing things where there needed to by systems in place – schedules and things that we didn’t have – and that was kind of my forte. So I first just kind of jumped into it voluntarily, and then was doing a little bit more and a little bit more, and ended up becoming the manager of the Milford office.
[As for us,] we were just co-workers for many, many, many years – and then we just kind of got stuck together. Permanently.
Q: So you were working together before you got married. How does that work? Because I’ve got to say – for a lot of people, it wouldn’t.
BT: We used to have much more distinct responsibilities. I’ve been giving over more and more control to Cheryl to fun the business, reserving just a few areas for myself. Financial, insurance, legal, that’s pretty much my bailiwick at this point.
Q: So for you, Cheryl, it really seems like you grew up with the business.
BT: Well, she was one of our top agents for quite a while. I remember, you were teaching that “5 Steps to $5 Million” course. And that was when our average sale price was about $138,000 or something like that. It was a lot of steps.
CET: I was selling about 40, 50 houses a year at that point.
Q: Do you remember a moment when you first thought to yourself, “You know, I really feel like I can do this”?
CET: You know, it sounds awful, but I don’t know that I ever had any doubt about it. The only thing I’ve never been successful at is playing the piano. Otherwise, when I’ve decided I’m going to do something, that’s it, I know I’m just going to do it. [The only tough part for me, was] probably the second year, I had to decide if I could learn how to compartmentalize it a little bit – because I would go home and drive my family crazy, stressed about this deal and that deal. I mean, I’ve had clients move in with me. Whatever it takes to get the job done. So the second year, I had [to learn how to step back a bit].
Q: You had a client move in with you?
CET: Oh, yeah, that’s happened several times. One of our agent teams moved in with Bruce and I for a while, because I had convinced them to buy a house – they didn’t own a house at the time – and they ended up buying an old VFW and converting it to a single family home. So they lived with us for a few months … way back, I had a friend I sold a home to, a condo, and she couldn’t move in right away. She was six months pregnant, and couldn’t move in in time, her whole family came to live with me … so whatever. Whatever you have to do.
Q: That level of dedication’s pretty rare.
BT: It is pretty rare. Cheryl’s always been willing to go beyond the call of duty.
CET: Well, one of the things I love about this business is how your clients become your friends. The toughest part is keeping up with everybody.
