Confident they have the ideal concept, managers of real estate companies seem to await impatiently the market's return to normalcy, to the good old days when making a buck was routine.
"They've got a long wait," said Allen Cymrot, who compares them to the maker of propeller-driven planes waiting for transoceanic airlines to get over their jet-plane fad.As real estate companies view things, he said, their concepts are perfect but the market has gone astray, and so they're prepared to hold on until business comes back, when they intend to do business as usual.
The problem, he says, is not so much about real estate as about real estate companies. "To most of them, their product seems blurred, which means their own vision is blurred."
Once, he said, the real estate cycles were set: market bottom, period of change, bull market, and then a reaction to the bull market. Each cycle averaged two years. "You bought at the bottom, held six or seven years and did well."
Now the bull cycle is gone, and "real estate is just another business to be run with sound principles and good management."
Previous bull markets, he said, originated in shortages, some extreme, but there are none now because of overbuilding. Equally important, the industry now has the ability to bring units to market quickly.
The set ways of the industry - owners, management companies, developers, lenders and brokers - amaze Cymrot, who sees opportunities for his Cymrot Realty Advisors, based in Los Altos Hills, Calif.
Cymrot believes he can use his experience to help restructure ill companies and recently has been working with a major banking house and forming an advisory board of experienced real estate talent.
To begin with, ill companies must sit down and "decomponentize" - and then they must establish a philosophy and a business plan, a marketing plan and a budget - and be accountable for it.