People who are considering real estate as a career often look at the field with myth-clouded lenses, thinking it is easy and offers a low-stress, flexible schedule.Geetha Vijay, a top-selling agent at Nothnagle Realtors, knows by experience that is rarely the case. Dinner reservations have to be canceled at the last minute because clients take longer to view a property than expected. Transactions become nerve-wracking if all the players involved don’t follow through on their end of the deal in a timely manner.

Still, “I think it’s one of the greatest careers,” says Vijay, who averages $7 million to $8million in sales each year.

Home sales in the Genesee region were about $1.78billion in 2006, according to the Greater Rochester Association of Realtors. That’s down 1.1 percent from 2005, a drop that does not concern Sandy Blonsky, the Rochester chapter president of the Women’s Council of Realtors.

“In general, the Rochester market is a very stable market. We never get the huge upswings, and that makes us more level on the downsizing,” says Blonsky.

Consider Vijay’s formal recognitions. For the past several years, she has been a regular on Nothnagle’s Top 30 performers list (that’s out of a total of about 600 agents in the company). She has also scored the Sales Master Gold award from GRAR, recognition for high sales volume. And in 2003, she received the Pinnacle Award from WCR. Nominations for that award are based on the agent’s contributions to the work environment and come from the broker and offices where agents are based.

“She is very well-respected by her peers and treats each transaction as a commitment. … Geetha is a top-notch professional,” notes Nothnagle’s Chief Executive Officer Armand D’Alfonso.

“Everything went so smoothly, I didn’t even think we were buying a house,” says Nelson Mathias of Perinton, who worked with Vijay when he and his wife sold their house in 2001 to move to North Carolina and then again when they decided to move back to the area a few years later.

Vijay, 56, says one of the keys to her success is keeping clients and the marketplace well-informed through the Internet and target mailings. Digital technology tools such as cameras, text messaging, online listings, e-mail and cable television are more important than ever.

Case in point: When an interested party calls Nothnagle’s audio databank for information on one of Vijay’s listings, the caller’s number appears on her cell phone and computer, and she can follow up with a call.

Vijay studied economics in her native Bombay, India, (now Mumbai) before she and her husband, Chellapa Vijay, came to the United States in 1980. She has a background in banking and earned her real estate license in Irvine, Calif., in 1988. The couple and their two children came to Rochester in 1993.

Vijay works with a variety of residential clients, from first-time buyers and relocating families to people who want to build a new house. Like her, many of her clients are originally from India.

Connecting with niche buyers is another way to stay on top of today’s changing real estate market, says GRAR’s incoming president, Chuck Hilbert.

“I see some really good matches with agents and the buying public,” he says.

For Vijay, the most rewarding part of her job is “being a part of making someone else’s dream come true.”
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