Real estate brokers for seniors

Senior specialist designation recognizes expertise working with buyers and sellers over 50

BY PEGGY BROWN
mailto:peggy.brown@newsday.com&subject=Age-appropriate%20brokers

June 14, 2007, 2:24 PM EDT

About five years after her husband, Frank, died, Esther Henegan decided - with her children's urging - that it might be time to sell the family home of 39 years.

The house in Jamaica had witnessed five children grow up, marriages blessed and grandchildren born - as well as the deaths of her husband and one son. "Around the time when I reached my 80th birthday ... my family, which is very protective of me, started thinking that my house was too much for me," says Henegan, who retired in 1987 from the post office, "and that's when they started looking around."

There were, of course, issues that often are involved when elderly people sell their homes. Among them was what to do with proceeds of the sale and how to handle the complicated financial details, which might be overwhelming for someone in her 80s.

Not to mention how selling the family home can be stressful for adult children.

So Henegan and her family turned to Realtor Patrick White of Home Driven Realty Inc. in Baldwin, since he'd helped a daughter and son-in-law buy their house in that community - and he'd earned the designation of senior real estate specialist as well. (At 54, White says he's also in the demographic covered by his expertise.)

Senior specialist programs

Now under the auspices of the National Association of Realtors, the 5-year-old senior real estate specialist program provides intensive two-day courses for agents interested in working with the growing market of home buyers and sellers who are 50 and older.

This market is becoming perhaps the hottest niche in real estate, says Priscilla Toth, director of professional development for the New York State Association of Realtors (the national association, to which it belongs, purchased the senior real estate specialist program in March). Toth says that at least 1,000 Realtors have earned the designation in New York, and the Long Island Board of Realtors has scheduled five such courses this year.

"The courses are becoming more and more popular," says Linda Bonarelli, the LI board's president, who recently earned the specialist designation. "I recommend to our aging consumers that they work with senior real estate specialists because they have the added knowledge. It [the program] helps the Realtor understand our aging population and what their wants and needs are compared to the general population."

So when Patrick White went to meet with Esther Henegan and her family, he brought the typical Realtor's package - house values, a marketing plan, "comps" (comparable sales) in the neighborhood and so forth - and then some.

He also came prepared with information he'd learned at his senior specialist courses, such as details on living wills, living trusts, capital gains, taxes, insurance and health-care proxies. All of which he clarified while Henegan and a roomful of her family members listened. And he explained that if they were interested in some of these options, an elder-care attorney could be useful.

"The most important part of the whole thing is that Mr. White told all of us what was going to happen," Henegan says, adding that, by speaking to her whole family, White made it unnecessary for her to explain his advice to each of her children separately.

"He just gave us information," says one of Henegan's daughters, Pamela Johnson, 47, who works for Geico and lives in Baldwin with her husband, Wayne, 44, and children N'Dea, 13, and Isaiah, 16. "He directed us in which way to go."

Wayne Johnson, an electrician, agrees. "Mr. White has experience dealing with other senior citizens, and he explained about elder-care attorneys," he says. "I didn't know anything about that."

Eventually, Henegan decided to have an attorney create a living trust, naming the Johnsons to deal with details of the sale. But signing the trust didn't put Henegan out of the loop, White says, since she still made many major decisions: "Mrs. Henegan gave me my marching orders."

White says his function as a senior real estate specialist is not to go beyond his expertise but to let older homeowners and their families know when it might be good to contact an elder-care attorney, an accountant, a financial planner or some other professional - "a team" for the senior citizen, he says.

Sometimes, he says, he'll even suggest that an elderly client talk to a banker or a mortgage broker if taking out a reverse mortgage might be preferable to selling a home in certain instances. Such a suggestion may result in goodwill but no commission.

"One of the things they teach you in the senior designation [course] is that you're an expert in selling real estate," White says. "There are other experts in other areas - I'm not an elder-care attorney." He also learned in the course when such an attorney might be needed by clients.

Henegan says the process had her approval, as did the way White handled the sale. "He just felt like family to us," she says. The house was sold two years ago, and Henegan says she is happy in her apartment in nearby Rochdale Village, which is close to friends and family and provides her with an active social life.

Over-50 market growing fast

With the baby boomers' aging, the over-50 market "is the fastest-growing segment of our population, so the need is great," says Toth of the Realtors' association. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, every 7.5 seconds someone turns 50, and that pace will continue for the next 15 years, she said.

The senior real estate specialist designation helps Realtors discuss "age-appropriate financing, managing capital gains and understanding the tax implications of owning, selling or exchanging real estate, housing options and the changing needs of maturing clients," Toth says.

Taxes and capital gains were not particularly on their minds when Theresa Trichilo, 68, and her husband, Domenico, 70, started thinking about selling their Syosset home of 38 years. He had retired about eight years before from a company that maintained gas lines for Con Edison, and his wife is semi-retired, running Theresa Trichilo Insurance in Syosset with their daughter, Valerie Trichilo, 29.

Theresa says she and her husband didn't know whether to sell the house or wait until they spoke with some Realtors they'd known for decades: Frank and Marilyn Urso, the husband-and-wife team at Syosset's Long Island Village Realty Inc., who are senior real estate specialists.

"We were deciding whether to sell the house or not," Trichilo says, "and we went down South and found a lovely home which was reasonable, the taxes and all. And we didn't know how to handle it." She says the Ursos "went ahead and explained it all to us, and they were instrumental in explaining this whole area of a write-off and of capital gains."

Among other things, Trichilo says, the Ursos told her and her husband they had an advantage in terms of capital gains since "both of us are still here," and then explained what would happen if one of them died unexpectedly before the house was sold.

Ultimately, she says, the capital gains issue made them decide to put the house on the market. They're relieved they did, she adds, particularly after finding out what happened to a friend whose husband died while the couple was weighing whether to sell. "My friend got caught" in a tax bite, Trichilo says; because she was a widow, "she could only write off $250,000 of the capital gains," as opposed to $500,000 for a couple.

Trichilo says the Ursos "wanted us to understand everything before we made a decision. They didn't try to push us into anything. They understood and told us, whenever we were ready."

Marilyn Urso says that, besides financial considerations, the real estate specialist courses emphasize being sensitive to emotional issues.

Urso, who is 60, says she and Frank, 62, "can really relate to the angst of the senior sellers, because we're in that same generation. It's difficult for you to leave a home that you've lived in for many years."

Those emotional issues were a factor when Richard Gibbs of Richard Gibbs Realty in St. Albans, another senior real estate specialist, helped Jimmie Ahmed sell her Springfield Gardens home to move to Memphis.

"I relocated because my mom, who is in Mississippi, is 88 years old, and I wanted to be closer to her," says Ahmed, 60, an infection control manager at a Memphis hospital. "When I had the call about the job, I had no time to prepare to get out of New York." She says that's when Gibbs stepped in. "What impressed me about him is that he answered my e-mail at 4:30 in the morning," she says. "Anybody who's working at 4:30 in the morning I want on my side."

Gibbs says he dealt with details of the sale while Ahmed moved to Memphis. He says she was very particular: Contractors had been buying one-family homes in her area and turning them into three-family homes, but she wanted hers to stay a one-family. She wouldn't even let him put up a "for sale" sign.

"My neighbors are very dear people," Ahmed says, and since she'd lived in her home 30 years and reared three boys as a single mom, she didn't want to help change the neighborhood.

Ahmed says she was pleased that Gibbs was sensitive to her wishes, helping sell to a family instead of a contractor. "I think his knowledge was over and above what I expected," she adds, referring to his expertise on capital gains and other topics.

Urso says the most important thing she learned in her training was to be sensitive to the emotional issues senior citizens face in selling their homes. "It becomes a kind of counseling thing," she says. "You know the whole process is going to take longer with them."

But, she says, while the extra training was useful, a lot of the course is "very common-sense Realtor stuff that everyone applies. It's an excellent reinforcement of some of the stuff good Realtors will do for all their clients."

Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.