A serious player

If David Morris has a reputation for something less than sociability when he's negotiating a residential sales transaction, it doesn't trouble him.

"I can be not the warmest person at times," acknowledges Morris, the president of the David Morris Group, which is affiliated with RE/MAX Realty Affiliates in Reno. "I take it pretty seriously."

Seriously enough that his three-person team sets a goal of a closed sale every week and really wants to close twice that many, a 100-closings-a-year pace.

And seriously enough that Morris' sales performance for 16 years straight has ranked among the top 0.5 percent of RE/MAX International agents worldwide.

Now 60 years old, Morris has been focused ever since he got kicked out of the University of Nevada, Reno, as an undergraduate and faced the strong possibility of getting drafted to fight in Vietnam.

Instead, he signed up with the Air National Guard getting a healthy dose of self-discipline and understanding of human nature during what he calls a life-changing experience.

Readmitted to UNR, he finished up a degree in marketing and began looking for something to do. He worked in a family-owned hotel at South Lake Tahoe, picking up a real estate license along the way. He established a kitchen store at Meadowood Mall.

Still searching for his place in life, he hired on with a residential real estate firm owned by Paul Perkins, now a senior vice president in the industrial group of NAI Alliance, and Bill Fleiner, who ended up as a significant player in the development arena.

"They made us learn how to do things the right way," Morris says.

Perkins remembers more about the young real estate agent.

"Although good training is a helpful foundation, self-discipline, dedication, diligence and perseverance are qualities that someone in our business needs to become really successful and David has those traits in abundance," Perkins says.

Morris' timing, however, was bad. During early 1980s, mortgage rates commonly topped 15 percent, and the market's swoon in those days would be without parallel until current days.

"I had to make a living," he says. "I had to figure it out."

He figured it out well enough to become a top-producing residential agent. And then he figured out that just closing sales wouldn't be enough. He needed to bring professionalism to the residential brokerage business.

"This is not a business for amateurs, yet it is manned by amateurs," he says.

That's the sort of commentary that fuels his detractors but Morris pays them little mind.

"If you're good, you better get thick skin," he says. "You're going to be the target of everyone."

Focusing entirely on the resale market no new-home sales, no foreclosures Morris figures his team is closing five times as many sales as the average residential broker in Reno.

"Volume is king," he says. "And volume is not king."

On one hand, bringing in lots of listings, pricing them right and getting sales closed keeps his team's skills sharp. On the other hand, the organization needs to keep running hard because its success isn't predicated on simply closing a big sale every month or two.

As the market has turned, Morris' dream of working four-day weeks and maybe taking a couple of years off to pilot his private plane around the world has become more distant.

He's working seven days a week but only six hours or so on Sundays from 6:30 in the morning until 7:30 at night.

And he's picking up new skills, earning designation, for instance, as a Certified Distressed Properties Specialist a few weeks ago.

Success, he notes, doesn't ensure future success.

"Don't believer your own press releases," Morris says. "You don't walk on water. There are a lot of people who are smarter than you are. Don't let your ego get in the way."