By Dallas Times Herald Classified, Saturday August 19, 1989

Carsha rainbow glistens amidst real estate clouds

In the once-hot high-rise condo market, an occasional ember still flares.

Take Dallas Realtor Carolyn Shamis, for example. The 47-year-old founder/owner of Carsha, Inc., has recently traded up from last year's Excalibur to this year's white Rolls convertible.

She's formed two new business partnerships in the past six months while also brokering some $30 million worth of high-ticket condominiums and other luxury residences through Carsha.

And she has continued to redecorate her 4,600-square-foot Turtle Creek penthouse while helping a number of others buyers lease their own.

For these and several other reasons, Ms. Shamis should have no reason to perceive recession in the local real estate market, much less adopt a siege mentality about it. However, precisely because she and other surviving brokers have become more business-tough and client-sensitive, Ms. Shamis-suggest, they've weathered and even prospered during their industry's house cleaning.

Business is an attitude, and if you don't have a good one, you might as well close shop, she said in an interview with the Times-Herald. You (the Realtor) need to be a servant who will show a home at 11p.m. on a weekday or at 9 a.m. on Sunday; and if you ever lose the feeling that you're there to serve, you lose your clients.

You ruin your shoes, you put signs in the yards and you put runs in your stockings, but you do those things because that's part of the service your clients expect. We've eliminated in this market all of those people (brokers) who couldn't make it in the first place. It got us back to basic-being kinder, nicer, more respectful; that is what it's all about.

Ms. Shamis indicated that banks and other real estate lenders could stand to take a lesson from the growing service mentality among Realtor/brokers, who are increasingly willing to share commissions if not business leads.

We (brokers) are working together better than ever, and we need and utilize one another better. But sometimes when we have a real person with real money and a real offer, the banks say their hands are tied. They've hired management companies to manage (foreclosed) properties that the managers have no vested interest in moving. Banks are taking two weeks or more to perform functions they used to do overnight, because people are sitting on their hands.

Ms. Shamis, whose specialty has concentrated on buy-sell transactions in the $1million to $2 million area on condo leases ranging from $1,500 to $10,000 monthly, recently closed the $13.5 million sale of the La Tour Condominiums on McKinney Avenue in Dallas as Well as making arrangements for the new trolley service there to make the facility a regular stop. Carsha has also represented individual units, blocks of units or even entire buildings for such clients as Preston Towers, The Claridge, The Beverly on Turtle Creek, Bonaventure Condominiums and The Athena--all, properties whose snob appeal and sticker price precede them.

Quality and luxury properties, she said, find willing (and qualified) buyers and sellers somewhat easier than other residential tracts, but they're not exempt from the same kind of devaluation mentality that keeps other North Texas real estate deals from closing. We have lost many deals be-cause the lender's appraisal doesn't live up to the buyer-seller agreement, she observed. And guess who gets blamed? The Realtor

Rather than harpooning sellers with the news that their properties' appraisal probably won't live up to their expectations, Ms. Shamis often forfeits the business while offering this advice:-

The leasing market is very hot right now; and if you can just hang onto your properties and lease instead of sell, the market will come back for you, she said, Don't sellout of desperation, because it makes the average price come down for everyone. If you can hang on, you will be better off and so will the market. You have to bite the bullet right now if you're a seller.

Belief in leasing's viability prompted Ms. Shamis to co-create Carolyn Shamis International Realty last month with its new marketing director, Scott Bean, who moved to Dallas last month from St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.

The new company specializes in leasing or renting luxury villas and yachts. She's also created a new office leasing division of Carsha, tilted Shamis and Russo, which will be co-managed by Dwayne Russo.

Yet a third move has been the hiring of a new leasing manager, Ruth Unger, to carry Carsha more into unique single family homes as well as its traditional strengths of luxury high-rises.

I have eight people working with me, and we're like a little family, she said, There's-not a competitiveness among us that is divisive. We've got our own niche.