This year marks 40 years for Betty Mann-Beebe in the real estate business. Today, she and her sons Bob McVey and Bill Mann operate Mann & Sons Realtors, which she started in 1984 with Barbara Moore. Their original office was located where Fractured Prune operates today on Route 1 near the entrance to Rehoboth Beach.

“I couldn’t have gone into real estate at a worse time, with mortgage rates hovering around 18%,” said Betty.

But Betty’s career in real estate started before that. In 1974, she first started working for Joe Hudson selling residential real estate, which in those days involved mostly mobile units.

“Back then about 57% of all the residential units were mobile or manufactured homes, and mostly somewhere near the water,” she said.

After getting her feet wet in the real estate business working for Joe, she went to work for another real estate firm in the area, Mae Hall McCabe. Then in 1984, she opened Mann & Moore Real Estate and maintained that name until 2002, when her sons Bob and Bill joined her in business. Today, the business operates under the name Mann & Sons. 

In 1986, Betty moved into the real estate rental business with about 40 rental units. Some of her early contracts included Star of the Sea, Edgewater House and Patrician Towers. Today, her company has more than 250 units under contract, which they lease to visitors and local residents. Early on, year-round and vacation rental income was about one-third of the total company revenues; today, it is closer to one-half.

And of course, Betty has seen many changes in the real estate business over the past 40 years. When she first started, the median home price in the area was less than $200,000; today, that number has soared to more than $400,000. With the increase in population and homes in the area, there has been a significant increase in real estate firms and the number of people selling real estate in Sussex County. The industry has gone from a few hundred Realtors to well into the thousands today, although there are many Realtors with licenses who only work part time.

Like many other industries, there has been a consolidation in the real estate business, with larger regional and national firms having offices in the area. To Betty and her sons, that has been a real opportunity for their business.

“We try to keep our service more personalized, and with more time and attention focused on the customer,” said Betty. “We also try to run our business more like a family. While many of the larger firms charge their agents fees for office space, administrative support, etc., we don’t do that. We want our agents to be able to keep more of the money that they earn and hopefully want to continue to work for us.”

Advances in technology have also had a significant impact on the real estate business. With high-speed internet capabilities everywhere now, Realtors often don’t need to go into the office, as they can do their work from home or even in their car. That same innovation in technology has also made it much easier for the consumer to buy a house. While the consumer doesn’t have access to the multiple listing service that is exclusive to those in the real estate business, there are many sites like Zillow, Realtor.com, etc., that enable people to look for homes before even talking to a Realtor.

In fact, Betty and her sons noted that people often research the houses they want to see first, and then find an agent to help them with the transaction. Similarly, real estate settlements used to be difficult to coordinate and time intensive because there were so many people involved in the transaction. And they all had to be present at the same time, in the same place. Today, the buyer and the seller rarely ever see each other.

Looking to the future, Betty sees a number of changes coming to the industry. One big change that recently occurred was the Supreme Court’s ruling that buyer’s agents cannot be compensated automatically through the transaction. Instead, the buyers now negotiate separately with the agents to determine what level of compensation the agent will receive. Because this happened so recently, her sons believe the dust hasn’t really settled on what this will look like going forward. Betty believes that anyone wanting to be successful in a real estate career in the future should specialize instead of being a generalist.

“Pick a niche and stay in that lane,” Betty said.

Good advice from someone whose 40 years in the business has helped to shape her view about what comes next.