At the age of 20, Daniel Jacuzzi began a career in real estate working for Century 21, and 39 years later, he serves as president of Select Group of Real Estate Companies, helping people realize the American Dream of homeownership and the importance of real estate investments for their financial goals.
Jacuzzi purchased CENTURY 21 Select in 1980, and, soon after, opened the Select School of Real Estate, where he served as both instructor and director. From there, he incorporated additional real estate operations, a mortgage company and other services to form the Select Group Real Estate Services.
“We’re always interested in growth, having grown from nine agents to over 750 since I acquired the initial company,” says Jacuzzi. “We run a real estate school, training new agents to enter the business, but are also active in recruiting agents that fit our culture and would benefit from our marketing and client retention programs. We’re always on the lookout for good acquisitions both within and outside the markets we currently serve.”
As CENTURY 21 Select in California and Coldwell Banker Select at Lake Tahoe and in Nevada, the company serves the Greater Sacramento, Lake Tahoe and Northern Nevada areas. While they all started the year soft, things began looking up this spring and summer.
“We’re focusing on three growth areas: helping first-time homebuyers; investors buying their first property or expanding their holdings; and retirees moving from the high-cost Bay Area to either Greater Sacramento or Northern Nevada and Lake Tahoe,” Jacuzzi says. “We’re working with our entire team to help them with social media and the communication styles of today’s consumers. We have a full-time social media coordinator and a five-person IT team helping to achieve that goal.”
While many companies have great tools for their agents to use, what sets the firm apart, Jacuzzi believes, is the fact that it has made the commitment and investment to take on a great deal of the expense of marketing and client retention at the company level.
“As just one example, we have a full-time marketing staff of seven people that is responsible for producing and sending out over 110,000 e-newsletters a month on our agents’ behalf,” he says. “These newsletters are individually branded to each agent and come directly from the agent to their client base with a link to their personal websites. In addition, we produce a quarterly luxury e-magazine to showcase our high-end listings.”
Jacuzzi notes that Select Group of Real Estate Companies has the same challenges as most companies, hiring and training the next generation of REALTORS® and helping its agents succeed in a crowded field.
“Both new and experienced agents are attracted to our partnership business model. Agents are simply too busy serving clients every day to do the hard work of developing new clients and retaining their prior clients,” he says. “We’re providing a higher level of service and education to our agents to help them be successful and still have a life, too.”
Vitals: Select Group of Real Estate Companies
Years in Business: 41
Size: 32 offices, 750 agents
2015 Sales Volume: $1.881 billion
2015 Transactions: 6,324
Region Served: Greater Sacramento, Lake Tahoe and Northern Nevada
For more information, please visit www.selectgroupre.com.
