Michael Thorpe and Kimberly Hardin Thorpe, co-owners of Treasure Coast Sotheby’s International Realty, one of the island’s top brokerages, have been wanting to open an office in Brevard County for years.
“We have agents selling in Melbourne and Brevard County and knew we needed a physical location up there,” says Michael Thorpe. “The normal model for expansion is you lease space and hire agents and ramp up that way, but that takes a long time, so we ended up buying South Island Real Estate, the most successful brokerage in Melbourne Beach, and hit the ground running.”
Founded by Wendy Murray in 1986, South Island Real Estate had, in Kimberly Hardin Thorpe’s words, “a very tight-knit group of 23 agents” who dominated the 32951 ZIP code area – a stretch of barrier island with about 7,000 homes that extends from Indialantic to the Sebastian Inlet – selling more property than any other brokerage by a wide margin.
“We had the opportunity to start at a very high level. Wendy built an excellent reputation over the past 30 years and this office is, inarguably, the top brokerage in Melbourne Beach, whether you look at one year, five years, or 10 years,” says Thorpe.
“For years, I have been solicited to become a franchise and nobody seemed to fit us,” says Murray. “But Kim and Mike brought the same kind of ethics and standards the business was built on and seemed like just the right fit. With them, we are able to keep the small-town feel locals are used to, but also gain an international reach for our clients.”
Since closing on the business earlier this year, Thorpe has hired 10 new agents and three dedicated staff people to service the office, which is located on A1A in the village of Melbourne Beach, a stone’s throw from the Atlantic beaches. The office is an integrated part of Treasure Coast Sotheby’s, which now has a total of 103 agents in Vero Beach, Melbourne Beach and a sales center at the Aquarina Beach and Country Club.
The new office gives Treasure Coast Sotheby’s a gateway to other parts of the thriving Melbourne/Brevard County market as well. Brevard has nearly four times the population of Indian River County, 570,000 compared to 147,000, and the city of Melbourne is five times as big as the city of Vero, so there are many more homes to buy and sell, including many luxury properties.
Along with high-end homes on the ocean and river in Melbourne Beach, Thorpe mentions estates on South Tropical Trail nearby that range from $1 million to $20 million and neighborhoods with multimillion homes in the huge master-planned community of Viera as places where his agents hope to expand their luxury business.
“The future of Brevard is very bright,” Thorpe says. “It has high-tech, defense and the space business. The biggest employment story in the country right now is all the engineers Northrup Grumman is hiring in Melbourne. These are people who buy real estate and join the clubs and become involved in the community and raise families here. Add in the growth of Space-X, Disney Cruises and all the high-tech spinoffs and it is an incredibly dynamic economy.”
The Air Force in October awarded Northrup Grumman a $20 billion contract to build its next-generation long-range strike bomber and in May the Melbourne City Council approved expansion of Grumman’s Manned Aircraft Design Center of Excellence near the Melbourne airport where 1,900 newly-hired engineers and other employees will be going to work with salaries averaging $100,000, according to Grumman, pumping some $200 million into the county’s economy annually.
Adding Brevard to its sales territory brings demographic and economic diversity as well as geographic expansion, Thorpe says. “The economies of the two counties could not be more dissimilar. Vero’s barrier island is bedroom community where the affluent come to recreate and retire. There is very little economic growth. In difficult times that can be a little tough, because no one needs to have that second or third home in a beach community.”
Conversely, Thorpe says, Brevard is a more flexible, diversified economy where people moving in to take a job have to find housing. He believes it provides a hedge in the sense it may be more resilient, or at least have a different trajectory, during an economic downturn.
On the flip side, Hardin Thorpe say Sotheby’s brings important benefits to agents at the Melbourne Beach office and to the community.
“We have something like 99-percent attendance at our weekly sales meetings,” she says. “Wendy’s agents are hungry for the information that is presented. They are amazed at the tools and resources Sotheby’s provides.
“Our agents are our clients, too, and I think they are happy to have more marketing and administrative assistance – drafting contracts and entering listings in MLS, designing brochures and postcards – that they didn’t really have before. We have hired a marketing specialist, an MLS coordinator and a concierge for this office.”
“I think the area is hungry for a luxury brand and Sotheby’s has become the number one luxury realtor in world,” Thorpe says, noting that Sotheby’s provides his business the most up-to-date Web technology, constantly upgraded, including a unique page for each agent.
“All our properties are professionally photographed, regardless of price, and with our cascading platform all of them go up on all the websites automatically when they are listed, including Zillow, Realtor.com, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Sothebysrealty.com, which gets a million visitors a month who can search by lifestyle, looking for beach properties or golf properties,” says Hardin Thorpe. “And Florida is one of the most searched areas.”
“Melbourne Beach has been discovered,” says Murray, who is staying on as a broker associate and honorary matriarch of the office. “The market is great!”
“Oceanfront property here is a steal compared to Vero,” Thorpe adds.
