September 23, 2009, 6:33PM

Real estate brokers tend to favor BMWs to BMXs.

They like pinstripes over racing stripes and spoilers to spokes.

Kirsten Kaufman doesn’t roll like that.

She’s the Bike Realtor.

Kaufman, a broker for three years, shifted her marketing last year to capture Portland’s growing ranks of home-buying bikers.

Portland is the country’s top bike commuting city among the 30 largest cities, Mayor Sam Adams said this week. That’s based on Census data that showed 6.4 percent of Portlanders surveyed biked to work last year.

Bike-friendly buyers tend to wheel around neighborhoods close to downtown. Those are the places where it’s easiest to commute by bike or use two-wheelers to get two loafs of bread from the corner store.

A neighborhood’s bikeability and walkability has a direct connection to home values, according to a recent study by Portland economist Joe Cortright.

Cortright analyzed home sales in 15 major housing markets and compared neighborhood walkability levels set by Web-based service Walk Score. In 13 of those markets, higher walkability scores were directly linked to higher home values. In the typical metro area, a one-point increase in the Walk Score led to a rise in home values of $700 to $3,000. The study was done for the group CEOs for Cities.

Kaufman talked Wednesday about how she became the Bike Realtor, how she deals with bike sweat and under what conditions she’ll brake down and drive a car.

For the record, we both rode our bikes to the interview.

Q: How did you come up with the concept of a “Bike Realtor”?

A: I started commuting by bike myself and incorporating cycling into my business. I was thinking about how there were a lot of other people like me who would value being able to find homes that allow them to bike to work.

I started doing focus groups by showing homes by bike to cycling advocates. All of the feedback I got was positive. Once I actively started marketing to people who want to drive less, my business increased. This year versus last year, I’ve almost doubled my business in the worst real estate market ever. I took that to mean it was a good idea.

Q: There’s got to be some drawbacks to showing houses by bike. Sometimes you work up a sweat. It’s more difficult to show listings across town. How do you deal with those extra complexities?

A: The sweating thing isn’t that big of a deal. And it’s Portland, so people who want a fancy Realtor aren’t going to work with me anyway. I find that there are a lot of people who are intimidated by that type of Realtor. Most of the people who work with me would not work with someone who was afraid to get sweaty.

The other question is very relevant. I don’t always show homes by bike. It doesn’t always work. If I’m showing houses all over the place in a day, I sometimes drive. No matter what, it’s a good idea to explore your neighborhood by bike.

Q: You work for a big traditional real estate company. Did you have to sell them on this idea?

A: No. My principal broker is completely supportive and has really helped me with this. They’re excited about it. I’ve gotten a lot of support from our marketing and PR department, which I get because I’m at a giant real estate company.

I have my own logo and my own domain and it’s been fine with them. It is surprising to some people, though. A lot of my clients are more about the home grown. But Prudential Northwest Properties is a locally owned franchise.

Q: Walkable and bikeable neighborhoods tend to have higher home values. But those patterns tend to make more livable neighborhoods less affordable and drive poor and working class home buyers to more costly lifestyles. What can you do to help promote more livable lifestyles in more affordable neighborhoods?

A: Many of Portland’s neighborhoods that are considered to be far out are not all that far out, especially when you take public transportation into account. Many of the outlying neighborhoods have commercial enterprises that could be stimulated by public policy.

In terms of what I’m doing, I’ve very excited about the connections made by the new MAX line. There’s room for bike and pedestrian infrastructure to be improved and extended throughout the city.

I am considering doing bike tours in neighborhoods considered a little bit farther out. Some of the areas I’d like to explore are Foster-Powell and Montavilla.

Q: What kind of bike are you riding?

A: This bike was built by Natalie Ramsland and her company is Sweetpea. She is one of the few woman bike builders in the world and does custom bikes for women here in Portland. It is a touring bike more or less. I picked out all the components and color and everything. I helped Natalie buy a house and when I ride my bike I’m inspired by her. It was her first house, and she was able to consolidate her business with her home.

Realtors can buy fancy cars. I buy a really fancy bike. It’s way better than a BMW.

– Ryan Frank

Reader response was mixed. An interesting idea, but what’s the point?

Here’s one: use it to measure increased home values

Economist Joe Cortright used Walk Score results to study the impact walkability has on home values in a paper titled “Walking the Walk“(PDF) commissioned by CEOs for Cities. The findings suggest that after correcting for other variables, homes in above-average walkability locations were worth thousands more when compared to homes with addresses rated as average.

Seems intuitive, doesn’t it?

Many home buyers looking within a city do so precisely because of a location’s convenience. They accept the higher “premium” to be in town. However, most people don’t consciously put a dollar value on that criteria. How would they? How much is it worth to live in a walkable neighborhood? Is it worth an extra 12%? 

The findings in “Walking the Walk” strongly suggest those numbers.

The study finds that with each additional point scored on Walk Score it is worth anywhere from $700-$5000 in increased home value. In some cases higher walk-values translated into a $30-$40 increase in home value.

Consumers are obviously placing a tangible convenience-value on walkable neighborhoods.  So, what is the use of Walk Score? It isn’t a perfect ratings system, but it can give consumers a tool to understand the value of one neighborhood over another.

For real estate agents, the scores can offer a niche market resource and a specialized advantage. For example, a real estate agent in Portland, OR has actually taken this type of market research one degree further.  Kirsten Kaufman is now known as the Bike Realtor and she specializes in helping those who want to drive less find the most walkable & bikable neighborhood.

People want choices and they are willing to pay for it.

The most convenient neighborhoods to live in are often the ones that have transportation choices built into them through mixed-use development and infrastructure priorities that actively create walkability.

September 25th, 2009
By Stephen Lee Davis

The latest batch of annual census data examining Americans’ travel patterns came out this week . The American Communities Survey surveys a cross-section of the country at random to find out, among other things, how they get to work. Do they take transit, do they walk, do they ride a bike?

Portland continued their national dominance of percentage of people who ride bikes, jumping all the way from 4.2% to 6.4% in one year. The city has invested in making biking safer and more attractive, which has paid off with more people biking, fewer cars on the road and cleaner air. With biking growing in popularity each year, scores of enterprising people have started bike-related businesses to ride the rising tide of bike culture in the city.

One enterprising Portland realtor combined the growing demand for homes in convenient locations with Portland’s biking fervor to boost her bottom line — filling a niche that was previously empty. When Portlanders want to buy a home that lets them bike to the office, the grocery store, or the post office, they call Kirsten Kaufman, whom Portland Live calls the “Bike Broker.”

Riding around Portland on her custom-built bicycle, she showcases homes that provide easy access by bike, by foot, and by public transportation — that is to say, the kinds of homes that more people want these days, but that other Realtors might not think to showcase. Kaufman has capitalized on the fact that convenience, short commutes, and access to the community without having to drive everywhere is as much a marketable selling point as good schools or low crime with a growing segment of homebuyers.

Riding on bicycle also gives her a better sense of the neighborhoods she’s selling in.  Of her strategy, Kaufman says:

“I started doing focus groups by showing homes by bike to cycling advocates. All of the feedback I got was positive. Once I actively started marketing to people who want to drive less, my business increased. This year versus last year, I’ve almost doubled my business in the worst real estate market ever. I took that to mean it was a good idea.”

Doubled her business? Sounds like she’s onto something.

PORTLAND, Ore. – With gas prices high, bicycles flying out of stores and a buyers’ market for houses, a handful of real estate agents around the country are touting the two-wheeled appeal of their listings.

Some even show houses exclusively by bike, wheeling through the neighborhood with potential buyers to show off bike lanes and bike-focused businesses and repair shops.

Clad in a purple helmet with plastic flowers dangling from her handlebars, Portland’s Kirsten Kaufman is part of a new generation of agents eager to replace the stereotypes of hauling clients around in fancy sedans or SUVs.

The mother of three starting hosting bike tours earlier this summer, doling out energy bars and apricots to a growing tail of clients whose passion for pedaling weighs heavily in their choice of homes. Some are hard-core cyclists. Others are moving into the city to avoid increasingly expensive and onerous commutes.

“It’s becoming more common to see families committing to driving less,” said Kaufman. “I think it’s a part of the market that will continue to grow as gas gets more expensive.”

Over the summer, sales of homes dipped by more than 15 percent from last year, according to the National Association of Realtors, leaving Kaufman and other agents looking for ways to spark business.

Bike agents say pedaling with clients is providing that boost. Behind a niche market that repsents only a sliver of natinal sales is a bigger trend — a fundamental shift in the way people think about buying homes.

Real estate agents and industry surveys indicate that home buyers are placing more importance on cutting their gas bills and commute times and that homes near urban centers, and subway, train and bus stops are selling faster than those in the distant suburbs.

In June, a Coldwell Banker survey showed more than 95 percent of agents say rising gas prices are a concern to their clients. More than three quarters of clients say higher fuel costs are increasing their desire for city living.

“Living out in the suburbs just isn’t a big deal anymore,” says Matt Kolb, a bike agent who owns Pedal to Property, a Boulder, Colo., firm. “People want to live, work and go to school within a six blocks radius — that’s changing the way they look at property.”

With a team of five agents, Pedal to Property has five agents, a fleet of 48 cruiser bikes and big plans for nationwide expansion. Next year, the company will stretch into Oregon and Texas.

“For people who want to drive less, it just makes sense that they’d be looking for different things in a neighborhood,” said 35-year-old Emily Gardner, a Portland-woman who has been trolling for a new house with Kaufman on the same bike she uses to pedal into the office each day.

“Kirsten was able to see things about places we were looking that I don’t think a normal agent would have noticed,” she said.

Circling neighborhoods in northeast Portland, the duo passed on a number of homes. Some were just too far out to ride. Others had no handy place to store the bike or were cut off from easy biking by hostile traffic.

Earlier this month, Bikes Belong, a cycling advocacy group, conducted a 40-state survey that showed more than a third of stores are selling more bikes, and more than 95 percent of shops say customers are citing high gas prices as a reason for transportation-related purchases.

Portland State University urban planning professor Jennifer Dill has studied how neighborhood planning affects cycling habits, and advises homebuyers to look for homes in areas with gridded street patterns and to avoid cul-de-sacs.

“On a bike, you want to minimize stopping,” she said. “You’re going to want to look at streets with low traffic volume.”

But most important, says Dill, is proximity.

Commuters in her Portland-based study rode an average of four miles into the office each day.

Even people who don’t bike often are finding bike realty to have advantages.

After months of searching, Gardner and Kaufman found similar success — a two story fixer-upper with a sprawling backyard and turquoise trim — surrounded by safe streets and easy access.

“I saw the yard and the garage and I said, ‘I have to buy this house,”‘ Gardner said.

But not all agents and clients are cut out for this, cautions Eric Rojas, a Chicago agent who pedals to showings and plans to start urging customers to ride along with him.

“This is a hard job to do on a bike,” he said. “You have to get the right people, and the day has to be nice — you have to be looking at property in the same couple mile location.”

For som real estate agents the idea of biking with clients is just too casual.

“Anything client-involved should exclude a bicycle,” said Portland real estate agent Charles Turner. “If you’re meeting someone on location, you’re not exactly business-presentable when you show up dripping with sweat.”

But Rojas says his clients have learned to accept it.

“If they don’t want a sweaty realtor, then maybe they want someone else,” he said. “Most people don’t care — the last clients I took out bought an $800,000 house — they aren’t exactly poor people living off the earth.”

As the real estate market continues to slump, Rutgers urban planning professor John Putcher says more agents will turn to niche markets, but that bike agents have tapped into a potentially booming business.

As the popularity of bike commuting continues to rise, Kaufman says she’s eager to see how far the wheels of her dark green Trek will take her.

“Ultimately I want to help people find a home that’s going to work for them,” she said. “This isn’t about trying to green-wash real estate or profit from a niche market — it’s about helping people make smart decisions, both for themselves and for the planet.”

© 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Cris Noreen, a broker in the Ventnor, N.J., office of Farley and Ferry GMAC, leads clients on bike tours of five homes at a time, riding five to 10 miles per trip. He says some 20% of his sales result from the tours. In Davis, Calif., broker Chad DeMasi got the idea from a client who met him at a showing on a bicycle, telling Mr. DeMasi he wanted to ride around each property’s neighborhood to get a sense of how bikeable it was.

While many of these prospective buyers pedal only for recreation — or view a bike tour simply as a fun alternative to sitting in a broker’s car — others want to cut down on daily driving. The number of people who use bicycles to commute to work grew 28% from 2000 to 2006, when 623,039 Americans said they did so, according to the latest Census Bureau data. The U.S. bicycle industry also has been growing, with sales totaling $5.4 billion in 2007, up from $4.7 billion in 2001, according to research funded by the National Sporting Goods Association.

Targeting the cycling community is a new marketing tool for the struggling real-estate industry. In June, sales of existing homes fell 15.5% from the same month last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. Riding down streets with prospective buyers attracts attention that could result in more business, these agents say. Some Realtors also attend cycling shows and “ride to work” days to boost their client bases.

One recent Saturday, agent Tammee Ryan of ERA Landmark in Bozeman, Mont., was out riding when she got a call from a client, Matt Kemmer. She met him on her bicycle, dressed in Lycra, and apologized profusely. Mr. Kemmer, a 34-year-old software consultant who also is a cyclist, had looked at 25 other properties, but he says he bought the one Ms. Ryan showed in part because they bonded over their interest in cycling and after she pointed out a bike path near the condo. “That’s what was important to me,” says Mr. Kemmer, who travels extensively for work and likes to ride everywhere when he is home. As a result, Ms. Ryan has started offering bike tours to other clients.

In New York City, Danny Davis, a top producer for Citi Habitats, regularly rolls up to client meetings looking like a bike messenger. Lately, he says, more customers are riding with him. “It’s no secret that biking is the most efficient way to apartment hunt in this city,” he says.

Yet outside urban cores, it can take much longer to see houses by bike, meaning agents usually cover only one neighborhood in a day. There’s always the concern that a client could get hurt and the potential for flat tires and broken chains. Bike tours don’t make sense in Northern winters, and clients sometimes get caught in the rain. And agents say some clients, particularly those who aren’t regular riders, can behave like kids, slamming on the brakes at intersections and ringing the bike bells incessantly.

Matt Peters, a broker with Windermere Dunnigan Realtors in Sacramento, Calif., thought about incorporating his bicycle into his job, but he worries it would diminish his professionalism. Agents in his office wear dressy clothes and drive Lexuses and Mercedes. If he showed up at appointments sweaty, with helmet hair, he says clients might not be impressed, even if they were riding themselves. “It wouldn’t play well with my company,” he says.

Other agents say showing houses by bike has been a boost. Matt Kolb in Bolder, Colo., started his bike-focused agency, Pedal To Properties, 16 months ago after he saw how much enthusiasm showing houses by bike generated when he was at another agency in town, Benchmark Realty. He now has a fleet of 48 Electra cruiser bikes (upright bikes with coaster brakes that are easy to ride). Every Wednesday evening, he and two other agents from his firm take out four to eight couples to see at least six houses. The clients tend to be in their late 30s and early 40s and include both hard-core bike commuters and weekend riders. After the tour, they go to a restaurant to discuss the houses. Sales at Pedal To Properties have risen 40% over the past year, half of which Mr. Kolb attributes to the bike showings.

It was Mr. Kolb’s willingness to go by bike that attracted Kelly Stroker, a 34-year-old research scientist who lived 15 miles outside Boulder and wanted to move closer to town, primarily so she could bike to work. She thought peddling from house to house would be a great way to judge how bike-friendly each home was. One Sunday last month, Ms. Stroker and her husband spent about three hours with Mr. Kolb, seeing seven houses. They eventually chose a $434,000, 2,100-square-foot house less than two miles from Ms. Stroker’s job and commutable entirely by bike paths.

Cyclists bring their own bikes when they go on Tour de Homes in Portland, Ore., a monthly two-hour outing with Prudential Northwest Properties agent Kirsten Kaufman, who also gives individual bike tours. Last Sunday, Ms. Kaufman arrived on her dark-green Trek, adorned with yellow saddlebags and a “Live Free or Drive” fender sticker, to meet eight home shoppers at a neighborhood coffee shop. She passed out booklets listing the four houses for show, along with a map of their route. As the cyclists followed, Ms. Kaufman pointed out what any agent would (crown moldings, refinished hardwood floors) but also focused on bike-friendly features, like a “tuck-under” garage located beneath the house — “Wouldn’t this be great to just roll your bike out of in the morning?” she said — and nearby bike-friendly establishments, including a café with ample bike racks and a gallery that makes bicycle bags.

Jessica Engeman and Erik Hovmiller trailed Ms. Kaufman from house to house, removing their biking cleats but wearing their helmets on the house tours. “This is a great way to find a Realtor who understands where we are coming from,” Ms. Engeman said. “It’s also a totally fun way to spend a Sunday.”

The couple, both 30-year-old renters, have been looking for a house for six months, with bike friendliness their No. 1 criterion. A three-bedroom bungalow with original built-ins catches their eyes, but there’s a sale pending. “It’s OK, because now she has an idea of what we like,” said Ms. Engeman, who commutes by bike to her job as a historic preservation specialist.

Write to Nancy Keates at nancy.keates@wsj.com

Portland real estate brokerKirsten Kaufman knows that in order to sell a home, you’ve got to first sell the neighborhood. And increasingly, in addition to the quality of local schools and proximity to parks, Ms. Kaufman’s clients want to live in a place that is bike-friendly.

To capitalize on that trend, Kaufman has launched regular “Tour de Homes” where she pedals with potential homebuyers and points out things like bike-parking and bike boulevards.

“I’ve gotten a lot of interest and positive feedback in the tours,” she says, “And as we cyclists know, there is an intangible and priceless benefit to be gained in ‘quality of life’ by getting out of our cars and into our communities.”

The golden rule of real estate has been always been “location, location, location”, but Kaufman says she’s trying to get people to think instead of, “proximity, proximity, proximity.”

[Editor's note: For more on proximity,check out this article by contributor Elly Blue.]

Kaufman’s next “Tour de Homes” is planned for the Alberta neighborhood in Northeast Portland. The ride will meet at Black Cat Cafe (1203 NE Alberta St) this Sunday (8/17) at 10 am. Reservations are required and space is limited so email kkaufman [at] prunw [dot] com or call (503) 233-9513 if you’d like to come along.