Chris Polychron

This Hot Springs Realtor has always seen his job as making others feel like they won. Little wonder, then, he has just been installed as the 107th president of the National Association of Realtors.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR. - HP Cover - Chris Polychron
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR. - HP Cover - Chris Polychron

Chris Polychron got up from his plain, bare working desk -- one of three in the small office room -- last month and, without even looking in the direction, pointed out the window and said, "I'm selling a mountain today."

Thursday night in the Big Easy, Polychron was inaugurated the 107th president of the National Association of Realtors, a million-member organization that bills itself the largest trade association in the world and only refers to itself in all-caps and with a trademark "R" after its name. For him to ascend the 800 voting-member group with just five Arkansas delegates, it's not unlike winning the White House from Little Rock, and incidentally, the last man to do that witnessed Polychron's inauguration.

"I tell you, Southerners have a way of winning people over."

Polychron's presidency was set long before Crye-Leike Realtor Beverly Carter was kidnapped and murdered earlier this fall, but the national fallout of that and other high-profile Realtor assaults has shifted his platform. Now, safety will be his popular mandate.

The mountain he pointed to is really a mount. Mount Riante. The stretch he's concerned with is five miles, he said, and features a seven-acre pond and a log cabin on about 1,600 acres. There are no utilities, no water supply -- just an old logging road up to a clearing. Some California buckaroos bought it with plans to subdivide and build on it, but the grade's too steep for any conjoined development. When it failed, the bank claimed title and now a former bank president -- Polychron -- will unload it.

Polychron, polychron. Tickles the etymological bone. Poly-, of course, a common Hellenic prefix meaning many. Chronos, the Greek word for time. So, Chris of Many Years, Chris More Than Once, Chris Ad Infinitum. Wait, that's Latin.

Kidding aside, Polychron is a youthful 70. He still does 50 pushups each morning, he said, which begins about 6 a.m. OK, sometimes 6:15. His drill sergeant told him 25 a day keeps the flab away. Fifty, then, must add lean muscle.

And Polychron is Greek. He can speak Greek conversationally, he says. He can also convincingly ape his father's Grenglish. He tells the story of being a teenager and sleeping in too late one summer day. Just down the street was a rental house his dad maintained with an old elm tree out front dead from blight.

"In his estimation, I was too big to be laying up in bed not doing anything. ... One morning he shakes me awake. 'You see zee elm tree at rent house? Zee blight killed tree. Yoovil cut it down.'"

Dad took him out on the porch and pointed at the tree.

"I looked at Daddy. I said, 'Pop, what're you going to give me to cut that tree down?' I immediately knew I'd said the wrong thing. He twisted my T-shirt and pushed my back against the brick -- I can still feel my back going up those bricks -- and he said, 'I'm a-gonna geeve you 'bout halfa day.'"

Polychron and his family grew up one street over from Gus Vratsinas on Cedar Street.

The two boys, born just eight days apart, each were the first-generation offspring of Greek patriarchs. Each had two older siblings -- a boy and a girl. Each went to Pulaski Heights Elementary School, Pulaski Heights Junior High School and Hall High School, then on to the land-grant university in Fayetteville. Each took his degree and, within a generation, met with great civic and financial success as a bank president turned Realtor (Polychron) and an entrepreneur (Vratsinas).

"I think a lot of it goes back to the parent and the religious fervor. You know, neither one of us was in Scouts, but we certainly learned the discipline young from our respective homes," Vratsinas said.

Despite his mother's wish that he become a doctor, the young man's early years working the counter of first Theo's Cafe in North Little Rock, then the Maxwell House Cafe downtown, tempered him for sales and salesmanship. Also, he made a D in freshman biology.

"I've had friends, doctors, say, 'My son's got a business degree and doesn't know what to do,'" Polychron said. "I sat them down, said, 'A businessman needs to learn to sell before he does anything else.' That's what I tell them, 'Get you a job selling something.' I don't care if it's soap for Lever or life insurance."

And then, never tire. Never get jaded. Never get comfortable.

"He's just always seemed to make the best of where he is and move himself up the ladder," said Jim Darr, a fellow Sigma Nu and a close friend. "He's almost a politician."

(If that sounds deeply disparaging at the close of this election cycle, it wasn't meant to be.)

Polychron likes to tell the story that he was walking down the street in Little Rock one day with Bill Snodgrass, a senior vice president at Union National Bank where he also worked, and Bill Matthews. "And I'll never forget. We pass this gentleman, and [Snodgrass] said, 'Chris, you know that guy?' I said, 'No.' He said, 'Bill, you know that guy?' 'I don't know that guy.' 'Well, hell, if the three of us don't know him, we don't need to know the guy then.'

"That's what I love about Arkansas -- if you grew up in central Arkansas and you go to the UA, hell, you know half the people in the state."

CLOSING THE DEAL

Out of college, Polychron went to Memphis to work for a securities firm cold-calling potential bond buyers. In that racket, you can never really know your clients. He returned to Little Rock and within the year began working for Union National Bank and the father of his boyhood chum, Sam Vogel Jr. The loan officers there were literally elevated on the bank floor "like they were gods." The platform officers, they were called. And they could make loans, even venture capital investments, on hunches and instinct.

"If you came into my bank and I knew your father, knew you were a respectable family, I could make you a loan based on that criteria."

By 1973, he skipped over to an actual investment house, Hill, Crawford and Lanford, to resume selling stocks and bonds, this time as a player. In 1979, a banker named Doyle Hopkins recruited him to run his Grand National Bank in Hot Springs. Within five years, Hopkins would file for bankruptcy, but Polychron said he grew overall assets from about $20 million to $75 million. Meanwhile, his wife, Janis, and now their two girls -- Natali and Nikki, then 12 and 5 -- had settled into Hot Springs. Though the big banking and investment houses in the capital city beckoned him to return, Janis Polychron insisted they make a go of it in Hot Springs.

After a failed business auctioning Thoroughbred horses, he got his real estate license in 1987. In time, he would lead his market in sales.

"When I got into the business you were the guy to beat," said Jim Kellstrom, another agent in the office who'd pulled up a chair at the desk adjoining Polychron's. "I can remember the day. This was just after I'd started in the business. We were playing golf, and your phone was ringing and you were [continually interrupted]."

"You thought, God, why would I want to do that!" Polychron said.

"No, I was thinking, 'How come my phone's not ringing like that?' 'Bam,' you said. 'We just got that one closed.' It was like a million-dollar deal. And ... I'm just trying to get a $100,000 deal done."

"It takes a while to get established in this business."

Nights and weekends, too.

"I was working 60-, 70-hour weeks then, easy," Polychron said.

Polychron, the only living son of a Greek immigrant restaurateur, is everything Dad could have wished for.

THE REALTOR PARTY

"I think a lot of Chris' success has come from his parents, frankly. I think his father had a great work ethic, his mother was personable," said Darr. "That Greek immigrant work ethic they had to have to make a go of it in this country."

The son's climb to the top of the National Association of Realtors seems a generational stretch, though. The process began several years ago when Polychron was elected regional vice president for Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas. When it looked like he could slip into the leadership team, he began courting blocs -- starting with Florida and its roughly 90 voting officers. "He's one of the emotional leaders of the association," said Dale Stinton, the chief executive officer.

"It takes you between five to seven years once you identify yourself as wanting to move up. ... You gotta do a whole lot of work, and all it takes is one slip, and what might be perceived as popularity [disappears]. It's a crucible. Chris is one of those guys who made it through the crucible."

Polychron will fly a few million miles between this year and next. This year already he estimates he has been away from home more than 200 days. That's a lot of co-passengers trapped between him and the aisle, seat belt and the seat belt sign, and he makes a habit of asking them, "You know the difference between a real estate agent and a Realtor?"

No one knows the difference, and why would they? It's a pledge. Realtors "abide by a code of ethics. I can turn in someone who's violated [it]."

Another difference is "we have a platform, the Realtor of the Future. It's going to require more education to become a Realtor than just a real estate agent. ... You know it requires more to be a cosmetologist [by state licensing standards]? Now, one fixes your hair, the other sells you a house."

After the Carter murder, the priority is safety. Polychron's idea is to ask each state legislature to require a single additional hour of continuing education yearly for all agents. That hour will be dedicated to safety. Besides that, he says, Realtors should always meet new clients in pairs.

If that sounds like a low-calorie response to a heavy blow, that's because Realtors are generally wary of putting obstacles between agents and buyers and sellers. Some offices -- such as the North Little Rock Crye-Leike -- now require potential new clients to show a photo ID, but Nikki Young, who is an understudy and successor to her dad, says their office isn't prepared yet to be that suspicious. Meanwhile, her dad has been bombarded by those hawking technological solutions such as GPS-enabled jewelry with alarm buttons.

"There are more people than I can count who have come up to Dad with some kind of [technological solution]."

Expect Polychron's term in office to be guided by the association's chief aim, advocacy. You'll hear this from Polychron, or executive director Stinton, or read it in Real Estate magazine, too -- the association lobbies for Realtors. And the buying and selling of houses, buildings and properties by Realtors. In fact, they often talk about the Realtor Party.

"On Capitol Hill and in statehouses and local communities around the country, the REALTOR Party is a force to be reckoned with," we read in Real Estate's May cover story on Polychron, "Advocating for Our Future."

"It's not Democrat, and it's not Republican. We give money each year to candidates that support our industry," Polychron said. "We even have a grid that determines how Realtor friendly they've been, not only on their voting record but on letters written to regulators, and just, how open they've been to suggestions we've had."

Defeated gubernatorial candidate Mike Ross was, as a congressman, "what we call a Realtor Champion -- the highest [grade] ... guess who his federal Realtor coordinator was?" Congressmen Steve Womack, Rick Crawford and Tim Griffin were all "very Realtor friendly." Senator-elect Tom Cotton was not.

In the truck on the way to one of Polychron's favorite eating places, La Hacienda, he says, as offhand as he can manage, "Say you had to mark D or R, what would you put down?" Him, he says, he's what you call an Arkansas Democrat, which makes him a Republican when he visits the coasts.

"Advocacy is our largest expenditure, and the amount invested increases every year," he told Real Estate in May.

That's the price to play, or maybe, to win, in Washington and state capitals across the nation.

And that's Polychron's great gift, to his clients and the 1 million members of the association. Whether representing a big soulless lender or a first-time homebuyer, "my job is to make you feel like you won," he says.

High Profile on 11/09/2014

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