Q&A with Mark Nottingham and Marc Hoeppner on @properties expansion
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In August, @properties IND, an Indianapolis-based real estate firm, extended its services into southwest Indiana. Brokers Marc Hoeppner, Chris Schafer and Will Ritter are heading up the new office in Newburgh on Ruffian Lane.
Hoeppner and Mark Nottingham, @properties IND broker-owner, spoke with Inside INdiana Business about the company’s latest expansion and the state of real estate in the Evansville region.
Tell me about @properties and @properties IND.
Nottingham: @properties is a real estate brokerage that started in Chicago in 2001. It was a downtown Chicago-focused company that very quickly accelerated to now the largest brokerage in Chicago and largest brokerage in the Midwest. They’re a Chicago, northwest Indiana, southwest Michigan and Wisconsin company.
In late 2020, they developed an affiliate program, which we became a part of in August 2021. So our company background was from 2011 through 2021 [as Plat Collective]. We were an independent brokerage in Indianapolis that affiliated with @properties in 2021 and have now expanded to southern Indiana through a partnership with The Realty Collective in 2024.
Why did @properties IND decide to expand into Evansville?
Nottingham: Number one is the opportunity to work with The Realty Collective. Great reputation, lots of experience, great citizens in the community and good at their job. We’re going to take that opportunity if we can figure out a way to partner.
Number two, southern Indiana is a good expansion opportunity for us. We have been able to grow our business significantly in the Indianapolis metro, but in terms of licensure, the way the real estate industry works is that we’re licensed to work anywhere in the state of Indiana. Evansville and Fort Wayne both present good job markets, growing populations and bread and butter Indiana housing markets.
Marc, what drew you to @properties IND?
Hoeppner: Alignment on values was probably number one. We’ve been approached over the years by many companies asking for us to work for their brokerage. Always had a great relationship and a great experience over at F.C. Tucker. When the opportunity came, and we were introduced to Mark and his team, we thought they seemed like the right kind of people we would want to be aligned with.
We went into the meeting expecting to not run into the technology and the opportunities that we ran into. After we finished that conversation, we explored it further. We thought it seemed like a partnership that made sense, not just for us as the team leaders, but it was an opportunity for our team members to expand what they can do, grow in their roles and also expand their financial opportunities with us as a company.
Marc, can you elaborate on the technology at @properties?
Hoeppner: In our business there are many different systems and places where we’re logging into to perform our daily tasks. There are probably six or seven different systems that you jump through hoops to get from one login to another.
The thing that hit me right in the face when we met with @properties was the fact that all of those systems fell into one specific platform. They all are accessed through one sign-on, one technology to operate from A to Z how a real estate agent works in a given day.
To create in one software, bring it over to another and try to bring all that in one place and then take it to the client platform allows me to take all the data that I’m putting together in the background and put it in a great client-facing presentation within minutes versus hours. I’m saving time that is now spent focused on my clients’ issues and needs versus trying to fumble through technology from one system to another.
In your news release about the southwest Indiana expansion, you mentioned the dominance of legacy real estate firms in the Evansville region. What makes @properties IND different?
Hoeppner: The biggest difference to me was a conversation we had very early on with Mark that centered around the idea of having a brokerage that’s agent-centric versus brokerage-centric. Essentially, that boils down to making decisions that are the best decisions for the agents who work for the company versus trying to protect the brokers as a whole.
There are lots of changes happening in the industry. There are lots of changes locally with economies and everything, the housing market especially. We wanted to be positioned with a company that was looking out for its agents specifically. We felt that this was the right alignment for us heading down that path.
What’s the state of real estate in Indiana?
Nottingham: Indiana has built a reputation as an accessible housing market. It’s very affordable. Traditionally, of the 30 largest metros in the United States, Indianapolis has been the second most affordable of those 30. And the rest of the state lines up consistently with that.
What has been one of our housing market’s greatest strengths is beginning to shift. Indiana has a good job climate and solid population growth, particularly in the three biggest areas: Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and Evansville. If you’ve got population growth, a good job market, a healthy economy and a state that’s functioning well, our housing costs are increasing, and, in some pockets, they’re increasing rapidly.
The percentage of people in the state of Indiana that will be able to own where they live is going down. In our view, having access to good representation that could impact your ability to purchase a home becoming more important. While the state’s economy is doing well, the job market is doing well and quality of life is improving, there are these longer term concerns about accessibility and affordability. A good realtor can have an impact on that for their clients.
Hoeppner: In Evansville, we’ve always experienced the extremes at a little bit less of an impact as other areas. Where other markets might be flying high on price increases, we may have lagged behind a little bit. There’s a little less volatility going up, and there’s also been less volatility going down as the market shifted.
I’ve seen the same thing start to happen locally, where the prime real estate—whether in different price points, it could be the lower price points, it could be the upper end, luxury homes—has seen a price increase that the wages are not matching.
We are starting to see a divergence between affordability that we as a local market have not experienced before. We’re seeing real estate transactions happen in a way that with good representation is beneficial for the clients and with poor representation can potentially put them in a tough position if the market does shift in the near future.
It’s more important now than ever that you’re working with professionals, which the Evansville market has a good base of professional realtors. We hope to expand upon that with some new services, technology and offerings with our commission programs that are going to be attractive for agents and for the buying public.
What advice do you have for people struggling to buy or sell homes in the Evansville area?
Hoeppner: It’s going to be situationally specific to the person, but knowing who to talk to is always important. Great agents are going to help you understand affordability in your situation.
Buying may not always be the best idea for you. You need to have an agent who’s willing to have those tough conversations to help you understand when is a good time to buy and when does it make sense to sit on the sideline and save up a little more money or wait for an opportunity in the price point that you’d want to be part of to jump on those good homes as they do come up.
What does the future of real estate look like in Indiana?
Nottingham: If you go back ten years from today and look at what a median home in the state of Indiana cost compared to what it costs today, and we shoot that out another ten years, but at a faster pace, there’s good reason to believe that a median home in the state of Indiana ten years from now is notably more expensive. A number that is difficult for us to imagine right now. And as a percentage of income, there’s going to be some challenges there.
If you’re looking at it from the perspective of owning real estate and wondering how that investment is going to do for you over the next ten years, you’ve got a lot of reasons to be optimistic and confident. If the perspective is you don’t own real estate but that’s one of your goals in life, the earlier you can start having that conversation with a couple different professionals, the more likely you will be able to deal with that challenge of increased costs.
What other areas of Indiana are part of the long-term growth strategy at @properties IND?
Nottingham: Right now, we operate in the greater Indianapolis area and all the surrounding counties, Lafayette, West Lafayette, Tippecanoe County and now southern Indiana. Bloomington is a spot we see a lot of crossover. Bloomington, because of the university, has so much overlap and movement between the city and the rest of the state. That’s an area of growth opportunity for us.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Nottingham: We’re thrilled to be in a community like Evansville and to be able to work with a team of people that have such a long standing reputation and experience of serving customers there. It’s one of the most exciting things we’ve been able to be a part of in our company’s life.