Champagne wishes and caviar dreams?
A guy with one of those ZZ Top beards has those kinds of ambitions?
“It was fun to watch those TV shows when I was a kid,” said Travis Broadwater, owner of and broker for Broadwater Properties in Wheeling. “I still remember some of those homes and how the movie stars used to live, and that’s why I still look at those kinds of listings. It lets you dream a little.
“It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to do real estate when I was a kid,” he said. “It just seemed like a cool thing to do.”
Broadwater grew up in Wheeling, and after a brief time with IBEW Local 141, he founded Broadwater Properties in June 2010. Since, the use of technology such as 3D tours and aerial photography has separated his firm from the other local real estate companies.
Broadwater, in fact, was the market’s top agent and top listing agent in 2021, and he will serve as the president of the Wheeling Board of Realtors in 2023.
“And since we started, I’ve had the chance to market and sell some of the homes I dreamed of living in when I was a kid,” Broadwater said. “Every time my wife (Jenna) tells me that we should buy it and live in it, and I just pretend I didn’t hear her.”
It Waves in the Wind
It’s about five inches east to west and six inches north to south, and when it reaches the point where it’s resting in the middle of his dinner plate, it’s trim time.
Yes, it’s the beard. THE beard. The official facial hair of Broadwater Properties.
“There only have been a handful of people who have told me that my beard is unprofessional. Only a handful,” Broadwater reported. “Most people really like it. Beards, I think, are more popular these days than they have been. I don’t think my competitors like it, though.
“When people have been critical, though, I’ve laughed it off and told them to give our company a try,” he said with a smile. “It’s not a gimmick. It’s not a trick of any sort. It’s me; that’s all.”
“Him” the husband, too.
“It started as a ‘No Shave November’ kind of thing a bunch of years ago, and my wife decided that she liked it, so that means it has not left since,” Broadwater said. “Every couple of months I’ll cut two or three inches off of it because there have been times when it’s been so long it’s been dragging into my plate. Can’t have that, now can we?
“Other than that, I like my beard,” he said. “Now, it does seem to be remembered by people like my clients, so if they say something like, ‘I bought my house from that bearded agent,’ there’s only one person they can be talking about, right? So, it works in those situations, too.”
The Real Deal
Now, if Broadwater must be honest, the billboard located above the intersection of W.Va. Route 88 and Wardens Run Road in the Griggsville area of Wheeling is not … to repeat … is not what it was supposed to be.
“With that billboard, we tried to go one step further than the extension on there now. We tried to get actual fake hair to put up there that would have blown with the wind,” Broadwater revealed. “Ultimately, though, the team at LAMAR could not figure out how to do that in a way that it would last any real amount of time. I really just wanted it to stand out against the other billboards in the area.
“I have heard about that billboard much more often than I anticipated. I have had billboards for years now that I’ve never heard about from anyone, but I hear about this billboard at least five or six times per week,” he said. “It’s the ‘beard board’ now.”
And it certainly is a conversation starter, and now that Broadwater Properties has expanded into East Ohio, the broker is hopeful his reputation plus the billboard will at least introduce him to opportunities.
“The beard has helped with our name recognition for sure, and that’s been a goal since we started the company,” Broadwater explained. “We’re doing business in an area where there have been a lot of established realtors for decades, so it’s been a goal to get our name out there. The board has certainly helped us achieve that goal, but then the rest is up to me and our team.
“But when it comes down to it, we want to operate as efficiently as possible, and that means everything from knowing our listings to communicating with our clients as often as they want to hear from us,” he said. “There are no established hours of business in real estate. You go when the clients can go, or as close to that time as possible, and that’s exactly what everyone at Broadwater does, and that’s why we have been very successful.”
Now with East Ohio in play, the “Wheeling Metro” market has nearly doubled, and that’s why Broadwater is anxious to expand his team to cover Belmont County’s 532 square miles. The office is located at 52171 National Road East (Suite #10) in St. Clairsville, and four agents are currently assigned there.
“If you ask anyone in the business in this area, they will tell you our overall inventory of properties is very low. We don’t have enough houses,” Broadwater reported. “If you could build me 100 ranch-style homes on half-acre lots, we’d sell them all tomorrow, but that’s not what we have coming up for sale. The average price range now is around $170,000 after it was just around $140,000 a few years ago.
“Any property you put on the market right now that is priced between $85,000 and $185,000 sells immediately,” he added. “Upper-end properties are starting to move, as well, and even the few million-dollar homes we’ve had come up have sold, too, so the markets on both sides of the Ohio River are good ones when you have something to sell.”
