“I thought a pound was, you buy a lobster and sit down and eat it,” said 85-year-old marine realtor Ralph Lombardi, recalling the time a potential client said he wanted to buy a lobster pound.
At the time, Lombardi was new to Maine and to the possibilities inherent in such a request, though he’d been in real estate 20 years as a part-timer. His career for the previous 30-odd years had been in the manufacture of industrial instrumentation. But he found he liked selling properties and was good at it, and before long, he made real estate a second career. Then in 1982, Lombardi and his wife, Maggie, moved from suburban Massachusetts to midcoast Maine.
Curious about this lobster pound business, Lombardi followed up on the request and found someone who owned one. That person turned out to be Robert R. Brown, also of Edgecomb, and then president of the Maine Import/Export Lobster Dealer’s Association. Brown owned a pound in Southport that had been in his family for years.
No sooner had they met than Lombardi asked if Brown if he wanted to sell his pound. “I’m thinking about it,” Brown replied. “When can we see it?” asked Lombardi. “Tomorrow,” said Brown.
They went to see it the following day and Brown explained how it worked. “Somehow he took a liking to me and took me under his wing,” Lombardi recalled. [He] taught me about lobster pounds from A to Z and introduced me to a lot of people who were involved with lobster pounds.” Brown became Lombardi’s mentor – Lombardi couldn’t have found a better one – and the realtor found himself building a niche in the real estate business, specializing in the brokering of lobster pounds, wharves, tank houses, lobster buying stations, lobster boats, and other marine-related properties. That was 12 years ago.
“This is who I am,” he tells prospective clients. “I’m good. This is what I can do. This is what I can’t do.” He’s about as direct as any fisherman – no fancy talk. And by now, he’s taken advanced courses and is a graduate of the Realtors’ Institute.
But just because Lombardi has a corner on the brokering of Maine’s marine properties doesn’t mean they come on the market every day or are a cinch to sell. He said people take up real estate all the time, thinking they’re going to make a fortune, but it’s not that easy. People fail all the time. “They have to love it,” he advised, “and they have to have enough money to support themselves for a year, to get started.
“It’s not all gravy,” he said, explaining as an example that he had Brown’s family pound under contract four times before it sold. Another client, Michael Pugliese of Stonington, Connecticut, first tried to buy a lobster buying station in Boothbay Harbor, but buyer and seller couldn’t get together on price. Then Pugliese found Lombardi at Muscongus Bay Realty, in Edgecomb, and the two spent a good year trying to buy a downeast property where, again, the principals couldn’t reach agreement. It took a second year for Lombardi to find and sell Pugliese a third property.
“I owe what I’m doing now to Ralph,” said Pugliese in a phone interview. “Ralph and I developed more than just a business relationship; we became friends.” He recalled trudging through snowbanks to look at properties with the 85-year-old broker.
Not only is there the snow to contend with, there’s the sheer mileage that a marine realtor has to face selling Maine coastal property. From Edgecomb, Lombardi has to drive 90 miles to reach Gouldsboro, where he has property listed for $800,000 – it’s not that the trip’s not worth the effort. He drives 100 miles to reach Kittery, where he has two properties listed: a tank house for $790,000 and a house and buying wharf for $950,000. Most of the time he takes his wife with him on these trips. They take their time; while he shows the property, she goes off and reads; they then go out to dinner and stay over at a motel.
Of course, not every property is one hundred miles away and not every property Lombardi handles is commercial. He has a residential property listing in Boothbay Harbor with 500 feet of deep water, open ocean frontage. It’s priced at $2.2 million, and Lombardi describes it in one word: “fabulous.”
Because he has become known for selling marine real estate, Lombardi gets calls from people asking him for an opinion of value. He said, “I can spend a day or two going over a property for a potential listing or sale and then not achieving it – there are a lot of intangibles,” he said, explaining that the arts and skills of a lobster pound owner/operator enter into the equation. “It’s partially skill and knowledge – it’s an art – and partly intuition, having a feel for it.”
Skill, knowledge and intuition come into play selling real estate, too. Lombardi loves what he does, has the energy of a man half his age, and is particularly interested in maintaining the working waterfront. He belongs to The Working Waterfront Coalition, a group that started a couple of years ago with very few people that now has over one hundred members. It meets monthly and tries to educate the public and influence legislation.
As a prime example of saving waterfront for the working industry, he said, “I was fortunate enough to sell a boatyard on Westport Island. This is the epitome of saving the working waterfront” (WWF, June 2004). “The yard was not active,” he said, “and the local lobstermen became aware of it. They bought it and created a co-op called the North End Co-op. It started out with 15 members; I think there are close to 30 now.”
Lombardi has several commercial marine properties listed and acts as co-broker on others. All told, he can show prospective buyers a fair number of properties.
“If I’d created this niche and worked at it full-time,” he said and paused, “the potential is unlimited.”
Lombardi can be reached at Muscongus Bay Realty at 207-563-2600, or by sending an e-mail to lombardi@muscongusbayrealty.com.