Realtor Wendy Heath chose to wear a bikini on a billboard she posted earlier this month on Second Street and Claremont Avenue in Belmont Shore. The advertisement is turning heads quicker than a Naples Island open house.
“It’s kind of flipped people out,” said Heath, who reported receiving almost as many calls from Realtors upset with the ad as those voicing support. “A couple of agents are having a fit about it, but that’s because they just didn’t think of it first.”
Heath said visits to the Web site accessible at www.teamheath.com and www.shocktheshore.com have spiked 400 percent since the billboard went up on May 2.
But the large advertisement also led to the 34-year-old mother ending her association First Team Real Estate after it put her and management at loggerheads. She is now with Long Beach Brokerage.
The photo was shot by Heath’s husband, a general contractor, with the family’s digital camera on an Alamitos Bay dock near Bay Shore Drive. Also in the digital photo is Bruiser, the family’s English bulldog, who asks via comic-strip bubble: “got real estate?”
“I’m here to create relationships with down-to-earth people who want to do business with me and appreciate who I am,” said Heath, who lives in the Shore. “More than anything, it’s got people thinking.”
Heath, who has been a Realtor for three years, was with First Team for more than a year before the clash, which sent her and the billboard idea to Long Beach Brokerage when she introduced the concept after rejecting First Team’s promotional ideas.
“When I came up with this billboard idea, I ran it by them just to be courteous, and they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no,” she said, adding that the First Team ads “were totally unacceptable, they weren’t who I am.”
She offered to remove the First Team logo from the ad, but the firm’s executives warned that she would be asked to leave the company if it ran, Heath said.
“Sex sells, but not in real estate,” said Rich Rector, manager of First Team’s Long Beach office. “I’m always somebody who likes people to think out of the box, but I told her she was going the wrong direction.”
