To get the word out about her client’s property, Mary Leavell, a local real estate agent with Keller Williams, is a big fan of using off-site signs—those placards that point, usually with brightly colored arrows, to property for sale off the beaten path.
“The stats I’ve seen from the National Association of Realtors is that signage sells 40 percent of the homes,” Leavell says. She’s currently using an off-site sign posted on Monticello Avenue to help her sell a property on Sixth Street SE. “That number seems high to me, but Lord knows, if that’s the case, I’ll buy some signs and put them up and try to sell a home.”
 Mary Leavell uses this off-site sign to point out a property on Sixth Street SE to travelers on busier Monticello Avenue. Such signs violate city ordinance. |
“People have to know what’s for sale and where it is,” says Leavell. “As long as it doesn’t annoy the landowners whose geography you’re occupying, maybe it’s O.K.”
In the eyes of the city, however, off-site signs are not O.K.—even when they’re on private property. “The law says that you cannot have off-premise signs,” says Jim Tolbert, director of the city’s Neighborhood Development Services, which polices signage. “We get complaints about realtor signs being put up all over the place on a regular basis. Some of them just don’t get it.”
On April 28, the city zoning inspector, Craig Fabio, sent a letter to the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors (CAAR), letting realtors know what’s allowed—which isn’t much. “Simply stated, all real estate signs posted anywhere, other than on the property that is for sale, lease or rent, will be removed by a City employee,” wrote Fabio. “All signage removed by the City will be recycled and will not be available for retrieval.”
“It’s like ivy, it creeps back, you cut it back, it creeps back,” says Dave Phillips, CEO of CAAR. “About every six months, we try to remind our members that they need to be observant of sign laws. They’re trying to market the property for their client, and the rules aren’t very clear, so they can easily get unintentionally violated out of convenience.”
The county doesn’t seem to have as many problems. “The realtors seem to be more responsible in that they put the signs in closer proximity to what’s actually for sale,” says Rob Heide, the county’s master of zoning enforcement. “Realtors are probably more responsible with their signs because they actually have to pay for those things, and they’re not cheap.”
But they’re cheap enough for Leavell, who uses the small, corrugated kind and doesn’t show any, uh, sign of stopping. “They just disappear and I know not where they go,” she says. “They’re not very expensive. If it does bother someone, they can just call the agent, and we’ll come and pick them up.”
“Realtors are just easy to blame for this,” says Phillips. “There are multiple varieties of signs out there for everything that you can think of that are in violation.”
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