Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 8, Issue 6, June 2004
Copyright 2004 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.
Swanberg Realty, a company of many firsts
By SUSAN PARK
Bill Swanberg is a man of many firsts.
At the tender age of 23 in 1973, following in his father's footsteps, he became one of the state's youngest-ever real estate brokers.
This was no minor feat. Brokers are different than Realtors or real estate agents.
A real estate agent is a salesperson who has taken a test and been licensed by the state of Washington to sell real estate, but they cannot operate independently and must work with a broker. All real estate offices must have a designated broker.
(Realtors are all together something different. They are dues paying members of the National Association of Realtors, a private organization.)
Swanberg assumed the role of associate broker under his father, the designated broker for their family business, Swanberg Realty in Lake City.
Swanberg says with a laugh that the old saying, "The sun never shines on your head as long as you remain in the shadow of the family tree" fits him well.
He has remained out of the spotlight, steadily building on the success of the family business his father, Bill Swanberg Sr., started.
A strong local business advocate, Swanberg has served for the past eight years on the Board of Directors for the Lake City Chamber of Commerce, including a two-year stint as chamber president.
Seated in his office now in the same place his father, with his ever-present cigar, used to sit seven days a week, Swanberg has been able to slow down amid the fast pace of real estate.
Although he took over ownership of Swanberg Realty in 1980 and became its designated broker in 1982, he said he wasn't comfortable sitting in the executive office until after his father passed away in 1996.
"He worked until the end -- he was a workaholic," says Swanberg of his father. In contrast, Swanberg says, "I learned to take it easy, do more family things."
* * *
Bill Swanberg Sr. got his start in the real estate business after returning from World War II in 1945 where he'd served as an officer in the Merchant Marine. He began selling real estate for Benton Realty in Lake City at the corner of 30th Avenue NE and NE 125th Street at what is now a karate studio.
A dead ringer for comedian Jackie Gleason, Swanberg Sr. was promoted to office manager after only one year.
By 1954, armed with nine years experience, Swanberg Sr. decided to become his own boss by starting his own company. He acquired a piece of commercial property on Lake City Way, north of what is now a Fred Meyer store and began to haul off 150,000 cubic yards of dirt to level the ground with the street. He ordered two pre-built modular office units to be trucked in, which were bolted together to form the solid building that is still used today as the office building for Swanberg Realty.
Swanberg Sr also opened a coin-operated laundromat in one half of his new building, and later leased the space to other businesses. In 1990, the building was renovated to join the two halves and create a large foyer. Currently, half of the building is leased to Farmer's Insurance agent Roy Ovenell.
The real estate business was slower in the mid-1950s than it is today, Swanberg recalls. Out of the only 50 brokers in the entire city, 10 operated in North Seattle, which included the newly annexed Lake City area, which became a part of the city in 1954. "Lake City was considered way out there -- it would be like Mill Creek today," says Swanberg.
But Lake City was a growing community that became the site of a building boom in those years, thanks in part to the opening of Northgate Mall, the nation's first modern shopping mall, in 1950.
Swanberg Sr joined a group of other business owners to encourage road access and development in the district's business core at NE 125th Street and Lake City Way.
Although family time was limited since his father worked the typical hours of real estate, nights and weekends, when buyers were free, Swanberg said they always took family vacations together. "Mom helped out by filing," he says, adding: "I was the janitorial staff."
To bring in even more business, Swanberg Sr. took a job as an appraiser manager for the Federal Housing Administration in 1959. The government in those days used independent real estate agencies to resell homes repossessed due to foreclosure.
* * *
Although eager to work with his father, Swanberg was too young at age 14 to become a real estate agent. By law, a licensed agent had to be at least 21 years old, just old enough to vote in those days. So he began working for his next-door neighbor, Don Adams, who owned and operated the Sky Ride at the 1962 World's Fair on the site of what is now the Seattle Center. The job paid well at $1.75 an hour, and Swanberg enjoyed taking tickets, operating the ride, and maintaining it. It was a fun job, he recalls.
While finishing high school at Shorecrest in Shoreline in 1965, Swanberg began working for his father indirectly by mowing lawns, painting, and helping to fix up the government loan homes for resale. Most of the remodeling work was subcontracted to construction companies. By working for Hanson Construction, Swanberg became a trained drywall installer.
Still eager to get started, he attended college at Shoreline Community College in the fall of 1966 to get a degree in business. There, he met the love of his life and future wife, Vicki Korbol.
"We didn't like each other at all when we met," recalls Vicki who adds that they first met while sparring on opposite sides of an intramural debate over the double standards of men and women. "We argued all the time," she says.
But as fate would have it, six months later Bill wound up asking Vicki out on a date by suggesting, "Neither one of us has anything to do -- let's go see a movie," Vicki recalls.
The movie was "The Graduate," a romantic film that inspired Vicki and Bill to stay up until the wee hours of the next morning talking and learning that they, in fact, had a lot more in common than either realized. Much to the shock of their friends, the two continued to date and from that point on were inseparable, Vicki recalls.
In 1970 after a long courtship, they were married at Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Edmonds where they currently co-teach Catholic Christian Doctrine to fifth graders on Wednesday nights.
After their first child, Stephanie, was born, Vicki put a picture on the refrigerator of her husband. When he asked why, Vicki explained, "So Stephanie will know who her dad is!"
At the time, Vicki said her husband used to leave in the morning for work before their daughter awoke and would not return home until after Stephanie went to bed.
In those days, there were no cell phones or pagers and successful real estate agents worked in the field all day away from the office with no way for others to get in touch with them. On Sunday mornings, Vicki recalls, she and her husband would be awakened by telephone calls from Swanberg Sr. who would demand to know of his son, "When are you coming into the office?" At dinner, they would be interrupted by calls from clients.
Three years later, when Vicki was pregnant with her second child, Shelby, she decided to give her husband a surprise birthday gift: an answering machine from Radio Shack.
It was one of the first ever, recalls Swanberg, who adds that it was "the size of a small refrigerator."
"Billy's parents were mad," says Vicki who adds that her mother-in-law told her, "I don't know why you bought one of these things. No one's ever going to leave a message on it."
Vicki says she and her husband always knew when Swanberg Sr. called on Sunday mornings even though he refused to leave a message because he would slam down the receiver when hearing the answering machine's recorded greeting.
Swanberg also recalls buying one of the first cell phones (also from Radio Shack) in 1984. "It looked like you were