Dana doesn't care about being #1, although he has been. It wasn’t so long ago (well, 40 years now) that he was a client and unable to find the kind of realtor he wanted: one that combined a solid business background with a sincere empathy for the buyer/seller; there were a few of the former and a lifetime supply of the latter. It was that experience that led him to walk away from a long and successful career in the hi-fi business giving scintillating lectures on the laws of sound wave propagation to halls full of 2000 people (James B Lansing Sound and Bose Corp), determined to be the kind of agent he wished he could have found, suspecting that other buyers and sellers felt the same way.
He's determined from the outset to do for his clients the things that, to his mind, any agent ought to do, but few actually do: finding you, the buyer, a loan is a good example. Where most agents simply turn you over to a mortgage broker (a middle man who doesn’t have the money), he actually shops the direct lenders for you myself, and then sit down with you and explain all the options. I go about this the way you would if you had the time and knew whom to call. I don’t get paid by the lenders (or anyone else) for this, thus avoiding any appearance of conflict of interest. This just seemed like the kind of thing a good agent should do for his clients. Almost none do because it requires time and knowledge of loans and lenders. Even if you’re selling your house, such intimate and up-to-date knowledge of lenders allows me to assess whether or not the loan the buyer is seeking (without which his full price offer is meaningless) is do-able.
Other areas where I am similarly thorough are contract negotiation, problem anticipation and solving during escrow, construction, defect repair, etc. It is not unusual to find me under the house in the morning fixing a pipe and negotiating margin or points with the buyer’s lender in the afternoon.
In short, his emphasis is on the nuts and bolts of the business, not the fluff. He does everything myself — he has no assistants, sub-agents, or secretaries to whom you are shunted off once the contract is signed. He's with you and on your side throughout the transaction. Whether you’re buying or selling, he personally meet every appraiser, termite man, inspector, etc — when you hire him, you get me and my expertise applied unblinkingly to all facets of the transaction. This, by the way, is the stuff that really matters — fancy ads, public open houses, even “internet presence”, etc, don’t have a lot to do with getting your house sold, notwithstanding what you may hear. He can explain better in person.
Agents continually brag about being #1 (whatever that means); He has been #23 in the country out of 90,000 agents, which generally trumps #1 locally, and he was #4 in Palos Verdes in 2012, #2 in Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices in PV in 2014, and #6 in 2016 overall in listings sold operating as described above, but it doesn’t matter. He treats every transaction with the meticulous attention to detail that he would want. If that results in hi being #1, fine; if not, so be it. He also belong to an exclusive group of the Top 10 agents in PV, which can really benefit you when selling — He'll explain in person. Here is a partial list of my past sales in Palos Verdes.
As a 74-year resident of Palos Verdes, by the way, there just isn’t a lot that gets past him.
Just so you don’t think his life is devoid of other interests, he has a couple of other things going on . . . he sings 16th Century Italian and Spanish Renaissance church music — Vittoria, Palestrina, Monteverdi — that crowd. He's also belong to a national club of guys who build and battle scale model WW 1 and WW 2 warships. He included a picture of my scratch-built HMS Prince of Wales on which the guns fire, turrets rotate, and it goes at a scale 30 knots. To give you some idea, it is about 5.5 feet long and weighs about 35 lbs. There are ships from many nations represented — Germany, Japan, Italy, US, Sweden, etc, and typical national battles include 50 ships on the water, Axis vs Allied. Ships include everything from IJN Yamato at nearly 7 feet in length all the way down to he's scratch-built PT-73 at 8 inches and 5 oz. Sea trials were in a Tupperware dish. In the middle is my newest ship — WW 2 Heavy Cruiser USS Des Moines. He also have a 1929 Packard Dietrich Dual Cowl Phaeton and a 1932 Chrysler Imperial Convertible Sedan.
