Brokerage Barons See Washington Making a Slow Recovery

With hope of gaining perspective on the Washington-area housing market, I recently asked two deans of the brokerage business, John McEnearney, 81, founder of McEnearney Associates, and P. Wesley Foster Jr., 74, founder of Long & Foster Real Estate, to chat over lunch.

Alexandria-based McEnearney Associates has sold real estate in the region since 1980. Foster founded his brokerage in 1968, and with offices stretching from North Carolina to Pennsylvania, it's the largest independent residential brokerage in the country.

They agreed, based on all their decades involved with Washington area real estate, that this is no ordinary downturn. Here are some lightly edited highlights of their discussion.

How does this market compare with others you've seen?

Foster: I've never seen anything like it.

McEnearney: It's a little bit disconcerting; 1980 to '81 was a terrible market because interest rates got up as high as 18.45 percent. We had to go through novel approaches to put a deal together.

Foster: But this damn thing we're in here now is another one that's giving us hell. I mean, pure hell. We're sweating.

McEnearney: I agree with that wholeheartedly.

Foster: Right now we're fighting for our lives. We're closing offices, laying off people. We're going to make it, but never in 40 years have we lost money. This could be the first year we've lost money, though we're fighting like hell not to.

McEnearney: I can't say we've never lost money. The first couple of years we were in business we definitely lost money. Also in 1991. But we haven't since then. But this is a tough market to make a profit.

Foster: This is entirely different because all the others, in my memory, were caused by the Fed's running rates up to stall the real estate market. They caused it purposely. This one was not that way.

McEnearney: And it has extended for a longer period of time. We've been in this for two years now. I started noticing a decline in the "energy" in the market, if you will, in the fourth quarter of 2005.