South Florida’s real estate consumers are ready for broker commission discounts if the first year of a newly launched company from industry pioneer Glenn Cohen is any indicator.

Deerfield Beach, Fla.-based Expert Realty, which launched a full-service real estate business offering 2.5 percent real estate commissions in May 2005, says in its first year it has achieved substantial growth and market penetration in South Florida’s Broward and Palm Beach counties.

“We’ve made a large investment in advertising and marketing and it’s really paid off for us,” said Cohen, founder and CEO of Expert Realty who also launched the low-commission real estate business model now known as Foxtons.

Many real estate companies have expanded their sales force, number of offices and market share in recent years to keep up with booming sales activity and brokerage franchises have also swelled. In addition, the number of real estate licensees who are Realtors has skyrocketed to an unprecedented 1.2 million, according to the National Association of Realtors.

“I don’t think anyone can say they’ve taken that substantial of market share in that short of time,” said Cohen, referring to Expert Realty’s reports of grabbing 5 percent market share of single-family homes under $500,000 in Broward and Palm Beach counties during the first 10 months of operation.

Expert Realty reports that it listed 465 homes in its two South Florida markets in March 2006.

“With these results in hand, we have begun planning an expansion into Dade County and expect to look at new markets around the country in 2007,” Cohen said.

Expert also reported that the company reached a 56 percent capture rate in its title business in March and a 28 percent capture rate in its mortgage business. The company is on track to beat its forecast of $15 million in annual revenue in its first full calendar year and to achieve profitability in the third quarter of 2006, officials said.

Expert Realty is a privately held company so its earnings statements are not made public through filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company’s business units, which also include Home Loan Store and Closing Solution, are fully integrated and occupy the same office building. In its first year, Expert said it has grown its employee staff from 85 to 187 employees today.

Expert Realty jeep

Expert Realty agents earn a commission plus salary, and receive benefits including health care coverage and a 401K program, according to a previous Inman News report. Also, agents specialize in either working with buyers or working with sellers, and all agents receive laptops, cell phones and branded vehicles. The company has purchased a fleet of Jeeps for its agents.

Asked about the local housing market conditions in South Florida, Cohen on Tuesday said, “Florida is mirroring the rest of the country and in transition … but the economy is good, interest rates are historically low and land is a limited resource here so Florida is always going to be a strong market.”

For Anna Rajber, waiting to get her price is no problem.

Rajber has been trying to sell her Jericho, N.Y., home since July, even knocking the price down from $769,000 to $739,000. She told Newsday this week she is not ready to bend any more just to make a sale.

“I think the house is still worth the money,” she told Newsday. “I don’t think it’s overpriced.”

On the other side of the coin, Mauri Chotin-Zemachson and her husband, Scott, are willing to wait, too. The Manhattan couple hopes to move to Roslyn or Jericho, but so far they think the houses aren’t worth the prices.

“I’m going to look until I find it,” Chotin-Zemachson told Newsday. “I don’t think I’m going to lower my expectations.”

That’s the push-point. This spring is telling a different real estate story for both buyers and sellers. It’s a story that the New York area hasn’t seen in nearly a decade. While it might be the heart of the selling season, the frenzy of years past is gone. It has been replaced by a far more tentative market.

What happens this season may set the tone for the future, too.

“It will tell us how the housing market will perform over the next year or so,” Pearl Kamer, the chief economist with the Long Island Association, told Newsday. “The spring tells it all.”

It is not a simple story. There are plenty of houses on the market with sellers trying to get the money that their former neighbors got last year. The problem is, the buyers are waiting for rock-bottom prices.

For example, Nassau, Suffolk and Queens had a total of 25,156 listings in February, compared with 14,653 a year ago, the newspaper reported.

But prices are still on the rise, even if at a far slower pace. And houses are selling — as long as the price is right.

Additionally, the length of time a house is on the market has barely changed. Kate Rossi, president of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, which has offices in Long Island and Queens, said the average number of days on market now is 82, compared with 80 a year ago.

The shift is under way. The market slowdown led the spring selling season to get off to a later start, most experts say.

And in another indication of the market, The Dallow Agency, a Weichert Realtors affiliate, had 40 to 50 houses on the Long Island Multiple Listing Service two years ago. Now, it has more than 200, according to Levittown-based broker Rich Dallow.

Sellers are listing now in an attempt to beat market declines. And buyers are being choosy, sometimes continuing to shop, even after a binder has been signed, experts say.

Another signal is open house attendance. Dallow said open houses now have an average eight or nine attendees, compared with 15 to 18 a year ago.

If a weaker spring is followed by an even weaker summer or fall, that may put the market on notice. And that’s when the reality check will come, said appraiser Jonathan Miller, with Miller Samuel in Manhattan, because there’s seasonal “static” now.

“We’re not seeing the gloom and doom at this point that had been anticipated,” Miller added. “But we’ve got rising inventory, and potentially rising mortgage rates and when you put those things together, that is not a good thing.”

The gravest danger for consumers dragging their heels on price cuts in a sinking market is that they can “follow the market down,” never managing to sell because your price is always just a little too high, says Christopher J. Mayer, a Columbia Business School economist. He and David Genesove of Hebrew University in Jerusalem found that when prices were falling in Boston in the early 1990s, two-thirds of the houses that came on the market were eventually withdrawn without a sale.

In parts of the country where the market is still strong, a common sin continues to be overconfidence. Owners typically don’t seriously consider a wide enough range of potential housing market outcomes, including the possibility of a steep decline. That leads people to take more risks than they should.