Harris McHaney Realtors Turns 30, Looks to Future

Patrick Harris’ office is jam-packed — floor to ceiling — with memorabilia. Family photos hang alongside newspaper articles and tear sheets of paid advertisements.

The eclectic artwork illustrates a 30-year span for his company, Harris McHaney Realtors, and a rich history of the Harris family in Rogers, including the Harris Baking Co. that was started by his father in 1926 and the family sold 40 years later.

Harris is the president of the Rogers-based real estate company that he co-founded on May 11, 1976 with Jack McHaney, senior vice president.

Harris McHaney may have just celebrated its 30th anniversary, but it isn’t slowing down.

The company staffed a commercial sales office within its Johnson branch in early May, will soon start construction on a 30,000-SF two-story Rogers headquarters and will open its fifth office July 1.

Harris McHaney posted sales of $470 million in 2005, coming in as the No. 2 area realty company, according to data compiled by the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal.

But what has Harris McHaney barking at the heels of the No. 1 company isn’t a cutthroat competitive spirit. Instead, Harris prefers to do it the old-fashioned way, with customer service.

“We focus in on quality and we focus in on relationships,” he said. “We’re here for the long haul.”

And it’s paying off, it seems.

Harris estimates that between 60 percent and 65 percent of the company’s business is from repeat customers.

Part of that business is tied to the company’s expansion throughout the market, he said.

Its fifth office will be in Siloam Springs, effectively giving Harris McHaney a presence across the Northwest Arkansas region (it also has offices near Beaver Lake, in the Bentonville/Bella Vista area and in Johnson, which covers the Fayetteville/Springdale market).

Thinking Success

According to several of his employees, Harris believes “if you’re not growing, you’re shrinking.”

“You’ve got to have fire in the belly. You’ve got to have a passion,” Harris said.

He constantly studies the market, surveying and tracking where the company’s business comes from.

“If we’re successful, we will get into the minds of the buyers and sellers and understand how they operate and understand why they do what they do,” Harris said.

The company holds five sales meetings a week for its agents (soon to be six, one in each office and a separate commercial meeting).

The meetings aren’t mandatory, Harris said, so he has to give his agents a reason to attend. He usually leads the meetings himself and talks about sellers’ needs and buyers’ needs, reviews all new listings and tries to educate agents about trends in the market.

“We’re very big on proactive,” he said.

Commercial Appeal

Harris McHaney has made its bread and butter on residential sales, but the commercial division is coming into its own.

Pat Morrison, senior vice president and director of the company’s commercial division, said between 10 percent and 20 percent of Harris McHaney’s revenue is generated from commercial sales. That would mean the company generated between $47 million and $94 million in commercial revenue in 2005.

Although the company has about 225 agents, only four are commercial-only agents. It takes a lot of $250,000 home sales to equal one $5 million commercial deal, after all.

One of those agents, Jerry Horton, just began selling out of the company’s Johnson office the first week in May to better serve commercial needs in Washington County.

Mostly, Harris McHaney represents commercial buyers, Morrison said. But the company was carrying between 50 and 100 commercial listings as of late May, or “a lot and not enough,” joked Horton.

Morrison and Horton said they represent a lot of investment buyers from New York, California and Dallas, and it shows no signs of slowing down.

Horton looks for the west side of Springdale to be one of the next big commercial developments in the area, following that town’s possible minor league baseball team stadium.

Barry Graves, a senior vice president and manager of the Johnson office, said his office alone did about $3.5 million in sales in 1997 (almost all residential), but that grew to $70 million last year.

“We’ve seen a lot happen [in Northwest Arkansas], but there’s a long way to go,” Morrison said, “so we’re geared up for the future.”

Recruiting

Another key factor Harris attributes to his company’s success is its ability to recruit and train good Realtors.

“We focus in on recruiting new agents so that we can bring them in and properly train them — train them into our culture, to our value system,” Harris said. “It’s important in our business model that we have people that share the same values.”

Jane LaCaze is an executive broker, senior vice president and director of recruiting for Harris McHaney.

She will also temporarily head up the Siloam Springs office during its first few months.

LaCaze said the company hires between 60 and 80 agents a year. The real estate business being what it is, about 50 percent of those stay, she said.

“So much of it is taking care of people – you’re not just looking at the dollar sign,” she said, so some new agents become disenchanted with the business.

She does a direct mailing every two months or so to middle-level sales producers at other real estate agencies fishing for employees who might be looking for a new challenge.

She also plans to hold a series of career nights in the near future.

“Hopefully we’ll get all kinds of people,” she said.

But a lot of it comes down to picking the right people and training them the right way, Harris said.

“It’s important that a Realtor not be emotional. Sellers can be emotional. Buyers can be emotional. Realtors can’t,” Harris said. “They’re supposed to be the level-headed one.”