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Prudential Fox & Roach acquires Zitomer Real Estate of Margate

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The consolidation in the area real estate industry continued this week with Prudential Fox & Roach acquiring Zitomer Real Estate of Margate.

President and broker/owner Beatrice Zitomer, Vice President Mitch Zitomer, and most of their staff of 15 will join Prudential Fox’s Margate office.

Margaret Guber-Nulty, of Margate and vice president of the Prudential Fox & Roach office, said this is the company’s fifth such acquisition since 1998. In June of last year, the Delaware Valley’s largest agency and the fifth largest in the nation acquired Vanguard Property Group of Northfield, adding its 38 employees and $63 million in annual sales.

The industry consolidation is being driven by the substantial advantages that come with size in the digital age.

Guber-Nulty said the Zitomer staff will now use Prudential Fox’s Internet and intranet tools, social-networking resources and marketing platform.

“Smaller offices don’t have the network and IT (information technology) department and marketing department and tools that we have within the company,” she said.

Those systems support 64 branch offices and 4,000 agents, she said, who in turn provide the resources needed for their development and maintenance.

Mitch Zitomer, also of Margate, said Prudential Fox’s vast army of agents alone provides marketing power he could never hope to match otherwise.

“I would normally have to advertise a lot in metropolitan Philadelphia, Delaware and parts of Maryland, and now we’re in those areas that predominate in our second home market,” he said. “I’m not running into Center City Philadelphia to sell a condo or house, but they can refer that business down to me.”

Prudential Fox & Roach also provides full title insurance services and has its own Trident Group mortgage services.

Beyond these synergies, the two Margate offices are a good combination, both sides said.

“We just don’t look to acquire and work with other offices unless we know our philosophies match,” Guber-Nulty said. “I’ve known Mitch and Bea for 30 some years and they have a great reputation in the market.”

Mitch Zitomer said the acquisition of his 23-year-old agency was well thought out from a business standpoint.

“This allows us to go out and work with clients as we’ve done in-house but now with Prudential,” he said. “When you know that the business is so cumbersome and responsibility for a lot of these administrative things is not your forte, you’re happy to have others handle them.”

The acquisition will give Prudential Fox & Roach Margate about 60 agents and a lot of support staff, Guber-Nulty said, and “definitely close to a 50 percent market share.”

Growing, but slowly

Friday’s anemic U.S. job creation number of 36,000 in January was the third monthly disappointment in a row. The nearly half-percentage point drop in the unemployment rate to 9 percent didn’t help much since it mainly suggested that more jobless people were too discouraged to keep looking for work.

Many other economic signs have been encouraging, from retail sales to factory output to complex forecasting gauges. The high job hopes of economists and everyone else, therefore, are understandable, but still premature.

This year will be better than 2010, but only a little better. We’ll feel good that we’re heading in the right direction, but we’ll still feel like we’re a long way from where we’d like to be or can bear to be.

If it’s any consolation, this is still the best case scenario. Frankly, the imbalances and debt levels behind the original collapse, financial crisis and following severe recession simply need a lot of time to work out.

The other option was a depression, which is what we got the last time we experienced an economic cataclysm of this magnitude. We’ve avoided that because we learned some lessons from the Great Depression and haven’t repeated many of our mistakes then.

But the option was never depression or robust recovery. It was, and remains, economic destruction three or four times what we’ve experienced, or painfully slow growth for several years.

Prudential Fox & Roach acquires Zitomer Real Estate of Margate is a post from: Real Estate Press Releases

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