Swearingen’s Dynamic Duo

Barry D. Davidson and Meg Morris, brokers with The Swear-ingen Company, don’t have adjoining offices. They don’t look across a partners’ desk at one another. They don’t shoot hoops together on the weekend. But when it comes to making deals, Davidson and Morris are a successful team. And their male-female partnership has made for a very lucrative year in a time when many brokers are having trouble buying a six-pack with their commission checks. By mid-November, this dynamic real estate duo had already exceeded last year’s totals for the top producers at Swearingen. Davidson was close to a million commission dollars, with Morris trailing him by some $200,000.

Morris says she and Davidson form a good team because he likes to work on the big picture and she takes care of the details. He finds the site; she runs the numbers. And they agree that between the two of them, they can do at least twice the work of a broker going it alone.

And sometimes it comes in handy to have a woman around. One of the biggest deals the two did this year was the sale of One McKin-ney Plaza to the Stone family of Cleveland. The client was a woman, family matriarch Maxine Stone, and she and Morris got along very well-to the tune of a $35 million sale.

But more often than not, the client is a male. Davidson says that in the beginning of a deal, many clients either treat Morris like a secretary or act like she’s not there at all. “It doesn’t really bother me,” Morris says. “Most of the time, once we get into the transaction they realize what I am contributing to the deal. And a lot of times I use my credentials-I’m a CPA.”

Davidson met Morris about seven years ago when she was a leasing agent for the Trammell Crow Company. He says he was out with some brokers looking at properties and had dealt with about twenty leasing agents that day.

“She was hands down the best of all of them, and we said she should really be working for The Swearingen Company because we knew Trammell Crow probably didn’t appreciate her like we would.” Jabbing at the competition, he adds, “they are a bunch of male chauvinists and we aren’t.”

Morris just laughs at such statements. . .all the way to the bank.