July 19, 2004
A delicate balance | Marcel Polak's Spruce Mountain Inc. sells real estate — and conservation
By Taylor Smith
Marcel Polak, owner of Woodstock-based conservation real estate firm Spruce Mountain Inc., never planned on becoming a real estate broker. Despite growing up in the urban environs of New York City, Polak's real passion was the outdoors. He worked as a naturalist at the Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge, in the shadow of the World Trade Center, and in 1978 moved to Maine as part of the back to the land movement.
In Maine, he worked odd jobs at paper mills and restaurants, and as a substitute teacher and census taker to make his simple ends meet. But the birth of his daughter in 1984 forced Polak to consider a more mainstream lifestyle. Installing hot running water and a shower into their homebuilt house was a priority, and Polak found he couldn't get a loan from the bank without a job.
It was at that point that Polak began to think about real estate. Not long after he moved to Maine, Polak spearheaded a conservation campaign to have the town of Woodstock acquire a three-acre parcel of land on Christopher Lake (which today is known as Bryant Pond). It was a rational thing to do, he says, but the townspeople balked. Years later, in the midst of his career crisis, Polak realized that his experience working to conserve land would lend itself well to the real estate trade. He proved adept at real estate, finding success selling traditional real estate such as houses, building sites and condominiums through Gilead Realty in Bethel.
But Polak never gave up his commitment to land conservation, volunteering his time to a number of local land trust and environmental organizations. In 2000, he struck out on his own, forming Spruce Mountain Inc. as an outlet for his seemingly disparate work. Few real estate agents count as tools of the trade kayaks, mountain bikes and GPS computers, but Polak's conservation and real estate work often takes him to remote parts of Maine where his two-wheel-drive Toyota Echo can't go. Mainebiz recently spoke with him about the differences ˆ and similarities ˆ between conservation and real estate, the challenges of marketing such a unique business and the changing landscape of Maine's natural places.
Mainebiz: A conservationist and a real estate broker seem like two very different things. As a conservationist, how do you deal with the real estate broker's role of selling development?
Polak: Whether I sell real estate or someone else sells real estate, [development] is going to happen in Bethel because it's a desirable area. As a broker, I maintained my passion for conservation by being a member of the local land trust [Mahoosuc Land Trust], which I started with a number of other people.
From the very beginning, the idea was not to stop the development. The land trust never got political and said, "We don't want this development or that development." The idea was to focus on the lands that had the highest public value and protect them on a voluntary basis. Not all land needs to be in formal conservation. In fact, I advise people that unless there are specific public values [in a property], the land trust isn't interested. It's really about the private ownership, and hoping that without putting any formal restrictions on it, the person who buys the property will keep it and not subdivide it, whether it's two acres or 50 acres. But that's fundamentally up the client.
What kind of traditional real estate do you sell to clients?
I'll tell you about three recent clients. One was a couple buying a house, and another was a young couple buying their first piece of land. They wanted to move to the community and build on that five acres. Those two clients were looking for primary homes. Now I'm working with a client who's buying forest land for a vacation property. It's a very wide range of traditional real estate ˆ I could just as well have sold a half-million dollar ski chalet.
Does your experience as a real estate broker help in your conservation efforts?
In order to protect land, you have to understand the real estate process ˆ the negotiation, the purchase and sales agreement, and all the laws that regulate how things are sold. If you know how to negotiate and buy land for someone, for a subdivision or private use, that same tool holds me in good stead if I buy the land for conservation.
Of course, what my master's degree [in resource management] added is my knowledge of how to evaluate land. I understood the natural ecosystem and the value of plants and wildlife. If someone was to buy 100 acres that had really significant conservation value, I could make some recommendations. But more often than not, the land people are buying does not have conservation value. If someone buys a woodlot, I can help them find a forester who will be sensitive to their needs rather than looking at the woodlot as a quick way to make money.
What kinds of clients do you represent through Spruce Mountain, and what are they typically looking for?
I have a varied clientele. I have traditional real estate clients and I also work with state agencies and land trusts. I do consulting work for the [Maine Department of Conservation] Bureau of Parks & Lands. I've done a number of baseline data projects with them. When a conservation easement is granted, you have to do baseline data, which basically documents the natural resources of a particular property. I was hired by [the Bureau of Parks & Lands] to do baseline conservation work on large easements the state owns, including a 9,000-acre easement in Pierce Pond in Somerset County and a 3,000-acre easement on Mattawamkeag Lake up in Aroostook County.
But the core business I'm really focusing on is the people out there who are interested in buying land privately and have specific, personal conservation interests. They may or may not put conservation easements on their properties, but they're buyers who have assets and want to buy land. I have one client who worked as a biologist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Virginia. He decided [in 2002] that he wanted to buy some land in Maine that had some conservation value. As a professional, he knew what those lands looked like and, as a conservationist, he wanted to participate and make his own personal contribution to conservation.
In Maine, we have a whole hierarchy of properties. We have properties that have statewide significance, properties that are of national significance and of regional significance. Along those hierarchies, you have different groups working and operating. For example, lands near Acadia park or along the Allagash would be of national significance. There are corresponding pots of money for all of these things, including the big one, which is the Land for Maine's Future program. But on the local level, there are gaps where there just aren't enough resources to cover everything.
I had contacted local land trusts to understand where the gaps were that they wanted to complete. A group called the Downeast Rivers Land Trust had been working on a project on the Machias River, and the land trust had tried to find buyers for a number of properties because they couldn't get state or federal resources to buy the land. At that point, the next best thing is to find someone who will buy the property and act as a conservation buyer.
My client [from Virginia] wound up buying a 60-acre property on the Machias River that had an existing cabin as well. Over the course of the year, he bought five additional properties on the Machias River totaling about 300 acres with 1.5 miles of frontage on the river. The state at the same time was doing a major project with the LMF board, putting together a conservation easement on about 18,000 acres on the Machias River. The property my client bought was one of the few outparcels that had been subdivided years ago, so he contributed to that larger project. And after I worked as his broker to buy this land, I worked with him to write the conservation easement that he gave to the Downeast Rivers Land Trust.
Are there many clients like that out there?
That client told me that there were others, but finding additional people like him really is a marketing issue. As a one-person business, I've got to sell the product, but I also have to do the marketing. That's a whole other realm, and it's very challenging for me.
What's your approach to marketing?
Some of my business has come [by] word of mouth, but I've also advertised in targeted magazines put out by the Appalachian Mountain Club and Maine Audubon. I have a website, but I learned quickly that a website doesn't necessarily drive clients to you. Depending on how the search engines process your business name, if you don't show up on the first page, you're dead meat. Now, I have three different portals for my website: www.sprucemountaininc.com, www.maineconservationrealty.com and www.maineconservationrealestate.com.
I'm also working with consultants from Deximer in Bethel to try and figure out how to use the website more effectively because it's not serving its purpose right now. I have a great story to tell, but if it's not getting out then I don't have a story. That's my challenge: I know there are clients out there, but how do I connect with them?
Is the bulk of your time spent doing conservation work or real estate work?
It's about 50-50. With consulting jobs, you do the project and you get paid. But in real estate, there's a lot of work that gets done that doesn't always produce results. You're showing clients property that they may or may not buy. I spend a lot of time with regular clients buying property, and some of those result in sales and some of them don't.
One of the things I've always been interested in is helping people buy affordable houses, which is a big challenge in this market. What brokers love up here are wealthy cash buyers who plunk down money. I had a recent project where someone was buying their first home, and the whole financing was a struggle because they were just starting out.
Were you surprised by Woodstock residents' reaction to your proposed conservation project around Christopher Lake in the early 80s?
The reaction I got at the town meeting was just a shock; people were hostile because public land was not part of the tradition. They thought that if you create a park, then people from away were going use it. And by "people from away," they weren't at that point talking about people from Massachusetts ˆ they were talking about people from West Paris and Rumford and Bethel. One of the things I understood was that private property rights are the real basis of real estate in Maine and New England, whether you're on the [political] right, the left or the middle.
How so?
Private property is the core way that people have built wealth in this country. I came from a working class family that never owned property ˆ we couldn't afford it. [In Maine] I saw private land owners who cared so deeply for their land in a way I had never experienced growing up in New York City. And there was that understanding that here's this model in Maine that's really interesting: You have property that's privately and family-owned and you have very effective stewardship. In a way, I still believe that if you can find family ownership that cares for and stewards the land, it's still much better than ownership by federal government or the state government.
Where do you sit in the current debate on land use in the state?
This is where I do come down to some degree on the side of environmentalists. We had a very stable corporate ownership pattern in Maine for generations. So when lands got sold, they got sold to another paper company and the public benefited from having wood supply, job access and recreational access, and the land was really well protected. The same thing happened with a lot of the family lands. But the frightening thing is that it's changed so significantly and we're seeing large corporate ownership shifting very dramatically. In our area, Mead, which was formerly Boise, sold all their land in Maine ˆ 600,000 acres plus ˆ and their land in New Hampshire, and it's all being broken up. That's having implications for wood supply for the mills. That's having implications for people hunting and fishing. And it's having implications for the forests because some of the land has started going to liquidation harvesters. The value of the land has risen so fast for development, [companies and private owners] are being forced to sell. I can't blame them; that's their right.
In Maine, he worked odd jobs at paper mills and restaurants, and as a substitute teacher and census taker to make his simple ends meet. But the birth of his daughter in 1984 forced Polak to consider a more mainstream lifestyle. Installing hot running water and a shower into their homebuilt house was a priority, and Polak found he couldn't get a loan from the bank without a job.
It was at that point that Polak began to think about real estate. Not long after he moved to Maine, Polak spearheaded a conservation campaign to have the town of Woodstock acquire a three-acre parcel of land on Christopher Lake (which today is known as Bryant Pond). It was a rational thing to do, he says, but the townspeople balked. Years later, in the midst of his career crisis, Polak realized that his experience working to conserve land would lend itself well to the real estate trade. He proved adept at real estate, finding success selling traditional real estate such as houses, building sites and condominiums through Gilead Realty in Bethel.
But Polak never gave up his commitment to land conservation, volunteering his time to a number of local land trust and environmental organizations. In 2000, he struck out on his own, forming Spruce Mountain Inc. as an outlet for his seemingly disparate work. Few real estate agents count as tools of the trade kayaks, mountain bikes and GPS computers, but Polak's conservation and real estate work often takes him to remote parts of Maine where his two-wheel-drive Toyota Echo can't go. Mainebiz recently spoke with him about the differences ˆ and similarities ˆ between conservation and real estate, the challenges of marketing such a unique business and the changing landscape of Maine's natural places.
Mainebiz: A conservationist and a real estate broker seem like two very different things. As a conservationist, how do you deal with the real estate broker's role of selling development?
Polak: Whether I sell real estate or someone else sells real estate, [development] is going to happen in Bethel because it's a desirable area. As a broker, I maintained my passion for conservation by being a member of the local land trust [Mahoosuc Land Trust], which I started with a number of other people.
From the very beginning, the idea was not to stop the development. The land trust never got political and said, "We don't want this development or that development." The idea was to focus on the lands that had the highest public value and protect them on a voluntary basis. Not all land needs to be in formal conservation. In fact, I advise people that unless there are specific public values [in a property], the land trust isn't interested. It's really about the private ownership, and hoping that without putting any formal restrictions on it, the person who buys the property will keep it and not subdivide it, whether it's two acres or 50 acres. But that's fundamentally up the client.
What kind of traditional real estate do you sell to clients?
I'll tell you about three recent clients. One was a couple buying a house, and another was a young couple buying their first piece of land. They wanted to move to the community and build on that five acres. Those two clients were looking for primary homes. Now I'm working with a client who's buying forest land for a vacation property. It's a very wide range of traditional real estate ˆ I could just as well have sold a half-million dollar ski chalet.
Does your experience as a real estate broker help in your conservation efforts?
In order to protect land, you have to understand the real estate process ˆ the negotiation, the purchase and sales agreement, and all the laws that regulate how things are sold. If you know how to negotiate and buy land for someone, for a subdivision or private use, that same tool holds me in good stead if I buy the land for conservation.
Of course, what my master's degree [in resource management] added is my knowledge of how to evaluate land. I understood the natural ecosystem and the value of plants and wildlife. If someone was to buy 100 acres that had really significant conservation value, I could make some recommendations. But more often than not, the land people are buying does not have conservation value. If someone buys a woodlot, I can help them find a forester who will be sensitive to their needs rather than looking at the woodlot as a quick way to make money.
What kinds of clients do you represent through Spruce Mountain, and what are they typically looking for?
I have a varied clientele. I have traditional real estate clients and I also work with state agencies and land trusts. I do consulting work for the [Maine Department of Conservation] Bureau of Parks & Lands. I've done a number of baseline data projects with them. When a conservation easement is granted, you have to do baseline data, which basically documents the natural resources of a particular property. I was hired by [the Bureau of Parks & Lands] to do baseline conservation work on large easements the state owns, including a 9,000-acre easement in Pierce Pond in Somerset County and a 3,000-acre easement on Mattawamkeag Lake up in Aroostook County.
But the core business I'm really focusing on is the people out there who are interested in buying land privately and have specific, personal conservation interests. They may or may not put conservation easements on their properties, but they're buyers who have assets and want to buy land. I have one client who worked as a biologist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Virginia. He decided [in 2002] that he wanted to buy some land in Maine that had some conservation value. As a professional, he knew what those lands looked like and, as a conservationist, he wanted to participate and make his own personal contribution to conservation.
In Maine, we have a whole hierarchy of properties. We have properties that have statewide significance, properties that are of national significance and of regional significance. Along those hierarchies, you have different groups working and operating. For example, lands near Acadia park or along the Allagash would be of national significance. There are corresponding pots of money for all of these things, including the big one, which is the Land for Maine's Future program. But on the local level, there are gaps where there just aren't enough resources to cover everything.
I had contacted local land trusts to understand where the gaps were that they wanted to complete. A group called the Downeast Rivers Land Trust had been working on a project on the Machias River, and the land trust had tried to find buyers for a number of properties because they couldn't get state or federal resources to buy the land. At that point, the next best thing is to find someone who will buy the property and act as a conservation buyer.
My client [from Virginia] wound up buying a 60-acre property on the Machias River that had an existing cabin as well. Over the course of the year, he bought five additional properties on the Machias River totaling about 300 acres with 1.5 miles of frontage on the river. The state at the same time was doing a major project with the LMF board, putting together a conservation easement on about 18,000 acres on the Machias River. The property my client bought was one of the few outparcels that had been subdivided years ago, so he contributed to that larger project. And after I worked as his broker to buy this land, I worked with him to write the conservation easement that he gave to the Downeast Rivers Land Trust.
Are there many clients like that out there?
That client told me that there were others, but finding additional people like him really is a marketing issue. As a one-person business, I've got to sell the product, but I also have to do the marketing. That's a whole other realm, and it's very challenging for me.
What's your approach to marketing?
Some of my business has come [by] word of mouth, but I've also advertised in targeted magazines put out by the Appalachian Mountain Club and Maine Audubon. I have a website, but I learned quickly that a website doesn't necessarily drive clients to you. Depending on how the search engines process your business name, if you don't show up on the first page, you're dead meat. Now, I have three different portals for my website: www.sprucemountaininc.com, www.maineconservationrealty.com and www.maineconservationrealestate.com.
I'm also working with consultants from Deximer in Bethel to try and figure out how to use the website more effectively because it's not serving its purpose right now. I have a great story to tell, but if it's not getting out then I don't have a story. That's my challenge: I know there are clients out there, but how do I connect with them?
Is the bulk of your time spent doing conservation work or real estate work?
It's about 50-50. With consulting jobs, you do the project and you get paid. But in real estate, there's a lot of work that gets done that doesn't always produce results. You're showing clients property that they may or may not buy. I spend a lot of time with regular clients buying property, and some of those result in sales and some of them don't.
One of the things I've always been interested in is helping people buy affordable houses, which is a big challenge in this market. What brokers love up here are wealthy cash buyers who plunk down money. I had a recent project where someone was buying their first home, and the whole financing was a struggle because they were just starting out.
Were you surprised by Woodstock residents' reaction to your proposed conservation project around Christopher Lake in the early 80s?
The reaction I got at the town meeting was just a shock; people were hostile because public land was not part of the tradition. They thought that if you create a park, then people from away were going use it. And by "people from away," they weren't at that point talking about people from Massachusetts ˆ they were talking about people from West Paris and Rumford and Bethel. One of the things I understood was that private property rights are the real basis of real estate in Maine and New England, whether you're on the [political] right, the left or the middle.
How so?
Private property is the core way that people have built wealth in this country. I came from a working class family that never owned property ˆ we couldn't afford it. [In Maine] I saw private land owners who cared so deeply for their land in a way I had never experienced growing up in New York City. And there was that understanding that here's this model in Maine that's really interesting: You have property that's privately and family-owned and you have very effective stewardship. In a way, I still believe that if you can find family ownership that cares for and stewards the land, it's still much better than ownership by federal government or the state government.
Where do you sit in the current debate on land use in the state?
This is where I do come down to some degree on the side of environmentalists. We had a very stable corporate ownership pattern in Maine for generations. So when lands got sold, they got sold to another paper company and the public benefited from having wood supply, job access and recreational access, and the land was really well protected. The same thing happened with a lot of the family lands. But the frightening thing is that it's changed so significantly and we're seeing large corporate ownership shifting very dramatically. In our area, Mead, which was formerly Boise, sold all their land in Maine ˆ 600,000 acres plus ˆ and their land in New Hampshire, and it's all being broken up. That's having implications for wood supply for the mills. That's having implications for people hunting and fishing. And it's having implications for the forests because some of the land has started going to liquidation harvesters. The value of the land has risen so fast for development, [companies and private owners] are being forced to sell. I can't blame them; that's their right.
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