The field of real estate involves the sale, management and analysis of land and properties. This is one of the largest parts of the economy and offers excellent job opportunities. There are more than five million people in the United States employed in identifiable real estate fields such as title insurance, construction, mortgage banking, property management, real estate appraisals, brokerage and leasing, and real estate development collateral for mortgages and a large amount of financial assets (Fulman, 2001). Real estate professionals are tied to the development of our society in a very direct way and participate in decisions that will shape the way we live for centuries. Work in real estate is personally rewarding, ever-changing and challenging. Real estate jobs tend to be more entrepreneurial and create opportunities to become wealthy if you have the right mix of analytical skills and entrepreneurial drive (Scott, 2000). One of the exciting things about real estate is that it can be approached from so many different ways. You can be a professional worker projecting and analyzing cash flows from new developments with spreadsheets; an agent in the field with heavy contact with customers on a day to day basis; or an entrepreneurial property owner/manager looking for undervalued real estate buys and strategies for creating value. Even in poor economic times, real estate ownership is an attractive investment for many small businesses. Chief among its attractions is the ability to leverage the purchase by acquiring property with other people's money. In fact, careful shopping and the right circumstances may even enable you to acquire real estate without paying anything down.

          As attractive as any investment may be, there are always hidden dangers that may surface later and prove overwhelmingly costly to the buyer (Scott, 2000). Among those dangers are potential nuisance suits, zoning laws, potential housing discrimination charges, the claims of squatters, and possible environmental liability.

OmanHomes Real Estate Agency

          OmanHomes is an established and a licensed estate agency, owned and managed by Omanis professionals team. Their knowledge of the Oman is its culture and its people are extensive and are able to offer honest and reliable information about the property purchase in Oman. Their teams are on hand and are ever available to help customers to choose the right property from the wide range available and at a price suitable for their needs and wants. Aside from that, the company offers a Price Quote Service wherein they will assess a property that a person buys through another agent in order to check its authenticity. The company also has a lot of properties via several agents contracted within the company.

          Despite its growing success, OmanHomes is still striving hard to meet their customers needs and wants thus the company itself keeps on seeking for ways and tactics to make it more successful, prevent committing same mistakes and to be able to stand up in a widely competitive world nowadays. This paper discusses and render information and recommendations for strategies to make the company ever more successful and create a much good reputation in the real estate industry.

Entrepreneurial Strategies

          In this modern epoch, internet is everywhere and is changing every business and every industry. It has created impact in several business and industry and has been utilized to exploit new opportunities, enhance competitive advantage or even to plan a timely exit from a market in which people believe will no longer be profitable for a person to compete. This process may sound like it is relatively straightforward and easy but in reality it is quite different. Despite the internet’s benefits to people it has impacted the industries in surprising way like the travel industry which has been devastating to the travel agents but beneficial to the consumers (Scott, 2000). It has also changed the dynamics of the financial industry and the structure of how the players in the industry money and has spawned whole new industries such as the online auction industry and e-commerce development industries wherein it has enabled them to expand into supply management.

          Furthermore, the internet also has invaded in the residential homes sales industry and will continue to shape and transform real estate in the future. Before the internet has taken place in the industry, whenever a buyer sat down with a realtor, the agent would ask what he’s looking for and would then go through the MLS computer or book and find a number of homes to show the buyer. And when the realtor was getting ready to go out to make a listing presentation, they would go through the computer or book and look for prices of recent sales to determine the value of a home. The internet is the perfect vehicle to facilitate this exchange of data wherein it has eliminated the cost of printing a new book every week and the storing of books. It has also made it much more efficient for realtors to conduct business and made real estate a much more open marketplace and as well as provides close to perfect information about home values and as a result saw a decline in both under priced and overpriced homes.

          Moreover, according to a Sheryl Pressler, the chief executive officer at Lend Lease Real Estate Investments Inc., Atlanta, that her main accomplishment and her role is to provide the various business with support in terms of resources and expediting the needed technology as they have developed a proprietary online research product that gives everyone in the office immediate access. This way, it would create an environment of knowledge which may help clients make more timely decisions. They acquired different businesses and don’t just assimilate all the businesses and lose the characteristics that made each business successful. The employees had each very credible research and decision-making processes which would allow harnessing all that knowledge and sharing it. Clients can find in whatever they need and information on leases to determine vacancy rates in certain regions to commentary on different sectors and on the overall economy and how it’s going to affect real estate. Going forward, challenge is also important such as providing the right structure for the organization and to be sure that the top management team has the resources it needs and that the clients are happy. Spending more time with clients such as pension funds, insurance companies in order to learn their needs.

          As a real estate agency you want to build a strong positive image of your company. By creating an effective brand, you can bring in loyal customers. As an agent, you are essentially selling yourself. So what is about you that you want people to remember?

          Brand loyalty is about emotion. Developing a good brand is about solving people's problems; it's about doing something better, and different than everyone else in your marketplace (Fulman, 2001). Many real estate agents claim to be "#1". This tells consumers nothing about who they are, or what services they provide.

          Branding is all about perception. What perception do you think is created when six other agents are claiming to be the "#1" agent? "#1" could mean a number of different possibilities. As a real estate agent, you should be thinking what drives emotion. Consumers are drawn to products and people who fulfill a perceived need.

          Furthermore, international real estate investment flows have undergone many changes over the past four decades; economic and industry-specific cycles have affected all of the firms and services involved globally in real estate. Real estate advisory service firms have responded in many ways, and their fortunes have varied increasingly competitive and complex real estate markets required international investors to become more knowledgeable about the unique requirements of real estate assets (Fulman, 2001). The demand for the objective counsel of property advisers with technical knowledge of functional areas and products appeared to rise incrementally with the expansion of commercial property investment. Real estate advisory services covered diverse disciplines within the real estate profession: the sale and leasing of property, real estate finance, institutional investment, property and asset management, portfolio investment management, and project management and construction. In light of the professions broad scope, the firms studied included several types of organizations: full-service and fully diversified firms; “niche” firms with limited, specialized practices; and other professional service firms, such as accountants, attorneys, mortgage lenders and financial counselors, which began to introduce specific real estate advisory service capabilities in the late 1960s. A critical issue in an examination of international real estate advisory service firms is that real estate, in all its manifestations, is ultimately a localized industry that requires expert knowledge and understanding of local property and investment markets. Whether regional, national or international in their scope, real estate advisory firms reviewed in the course of this study succeeded or failed due to their collective local expertise, reputation and professional relationships (Fulman, 2001). These twin, and often competing, requirements for local responsiveness and a multinational organizational structure define the broad outlines for evaluating the relevant factors that have prompted and sustained the growth of international real estate services since 1960. Unlike capital and securities markets, real estate lacked a centralized market mechanism; each market, large or small, was discrete and fiercely independent. Thus, to a greater extent than other financial services, real estate advisory services depended on both market mechanisms and the firm as a coordinating element.

          The client market was also unstructured. Clients, typically the source of investment capital, commissioned real estate advisers for third-party counsel and for specialized expertise about particular property and financial markets. Most property service firms advised both real estate and non-real estate entities: individual investors, multinational corporations, commercial and merchant banks, building societies in the UK, savings and loan associations in the US, insurance and pension funds, universities, local governments, securitized investment and unit trusts, and international developers and construction firms.

          Real estate advisory service firms in the focal countries acquired competitive advantage in the international marketplace by continually developing new skills and entering new markets (Lapier, 1998). Innovations in services and market-oriented techniques, together, advanced the internationalization of real estate advisory services throughout the thirty-seven-year period. While such international trade theorists as Wells, Casson, and Sampson and Snape defined trade in services as the cross-border transfer of just service factors, real estate services trade involved the mobility of both service factors (investors and professional advisers) and/or local service products (real estate investment and investment advisory services). To promote internationalization, real estate advisory firms innovated by moving into new products (services) and new functions (foreign markets and foreign investor clients).

          Changing economic environments necessitated new approaches to real estate acquisitions, dispositions, financings, management and development. During recessionary cycles, corporations, investors and real estate developers demanded new mechanisms to strengthen or salvage yields on property investments (Backman and Butler, 2003). Rising stocks of real estate investment also tended to prompt service and technical innovations, to reinforce international investment activity in property, and to improve investment yields relative to real estate costs. Investors became uncertain in unusually strong or weak market environments and tended to intensify demand for more and new types of real estate investment. Exceptionally active cross-border markets, such as the UK in the 1960s (outward investment), Germany in the 1970s (outward investment), and the US and Japan in the 1980s (inward and outward investment, respectively), stimulated a higher degree of innovation.Significant shift in GDP growth or decline was a second indicator of turbulence in the national economy, and usually, in down cycles, created new forces in the real estate marketplace that transformed standard practices to daunting challenges (Lapier, 1998). The dynamics of the market thus attracted prominent investors and qualified professionals, and enlarged the national market’s opportunities for investors, professional skills and ongoing innovation. Innovation became an essential factor in attracting and retaining domestic and global investors throughout periodic, up-and-down investment cycles. For example, when foreign investment capital increased globally after 1978, US investment banks introduced innovative debt and equity instruments to finance real estate investment worldwide, thereby attracting an abundance of real estate capital to diverse and profitable US markets.

          Taking a locally developed service product or technical product into the international marketplace required an open industry structure that enabled innovations introduced in one particular sector or local market to flow by competitive supply-and-demand forces throughout the national system. In essence, the broadly defined and relatively flexible structure of this industry and its profession encouraged innovation and diversification (Backman and Butler, 2003).

          Real estate advisory firms, unlike other professional services such as law or medicine, defied classification into distinct groups. As the real estate industry and property professions matured nationally and internationalized, real estate advisers in the focal countries called on different professional services to complement and expand existing practices (Goodman and Jackson, 2000). Many sectoral firms—including pension funds, insurance companies, commercial and merchant banks, investment banks, developers and contractors, equity funds, and investment trusts—diversified vertically to integrate some form of property consulting into the mainline business. Firms that gained competitive advantage nationally and globally would extend services and technical skills through existing expertise, rather than create or acquire wholly new products; furthermore, they possessed the administrative, financial, tactical and political capabilities to export innovations to new foreign markets and investors.

          Restraints and barriers on trade in international markets most of all limited the effective and efficient transfer of skills, services technologies and specialization to foreign markets. Persistent protectionism through strict immigration and labor laws in Japan and local ownership rules in Europe and Japan hindered the progress of internationalizing real estate service firms as well as other professional services (Backman and Butler, 2003). Since the 1950s, for example, most European nations have required foreign investors to secure offshore funding, rather than to rely only on domestic sources for real estate acquisitions. Provincial investment practices encouraged both domestic and foreign real estate advisers to expand operations across multiple countries in Europe to diversify risk and gain an adequate return on investment. In this environment, domestic UK and German firms enjoyed a competitive advantage over US and Japanese real estate advisory firms (Lapier, 1998). Even German real estate service firms, being highly localized in their operations, were at risk in challenging international competitors on a purely local approach. Inegalitarian market access in the UK, Germany, and Japan in particular, hindered the cross-border transfer of innovative services among foreign competitors. Instead, most innovations throughout the 1960-97 period depended largely on fluid communications among professionals and firms in each country.

Bibliography:

Backman, M., and Butler, C. (2003). Big in Asia: 25 Strategies for Business Success. New York:           Palgraye Macmillan

Fulman, R. (2001). On the other side: Lend Lease CEO Sheryl Pressler wants to focus on clients.           Pensions and Investments, February 5, 2001

Goodman, G and Jackson, M. (2000). Flying Solo: How to Build a Profitable Enterprise. Magazine           Article: Black Enterprise, Vol. 30, January 2000

Lapier, T. (1998). Competition, Growth Strategies, and the Globalization of Services: Real Estate           Advisory Services in Japan, Europe, and the United States. London: Routledge

Scott, N. (2000). Path to Entrepreneurial Success. Magazine Article: Black Enterprise, Vol. 31