Alan Long, who founded DBL Realtors 17 years ago with two partners, finds himself at a crossroads. Two weeks ago, Sotheby’s International Realty Inc. acquired the company for an undisclosed sum and named Long head of its Southern California operations. The deal makes Sotheby’s one of the stronger residential brokers in Los Angeles County. It also folded one of the region’s few remaining independent firms into Cendant Corp., which besides Sotheby’s owns Coldwell Banker and Century 21 residential brokerages. Many entrepreneurs have found it hard to work within the strictures of the larger corporations after they sell their businesses to them. Long, however, said the acquisition won’t change how he and his agents operate.

Question: What prompted you to sell the business?

Answer: I didn’t set out trying to sell the company. I started about a year ago looking to other real estate companies throughout California to set up a referral affiliation network with. But I was finding it was impossible to get everyone to agree on the direction and the format.

Q: How then did the shift to a sale come?

A: Sotheby’s came along and gave us all these wonderful affiliations in Santa Barbara, San Francisco, the East Coast, Palm Beach, Jackson Hole, London. The deal made a lot of sense. Also, when you think about it, we’re 18 years old and have only nine offices so we didn’t grow that fast. It breaks down to only two offices per year, which isn’t like Jack in the Box or anything.

Q: You’ll be going from running your own show to having to deal with the discipline of reporting quarterly results as a publicly traded company. What will that be like?

A: We’ve always made money. We’re looking at this as being able to expand our market presence. Sotheby’s isn’t pushing us for numbers. They want us to continue operating at the same consistent quality we have been doing. They are more interested in how we treat our clients and their properties than just churning out numbers.

Q: What’s your take on the local market? Things look to have slowed recently.

A: Real estate operates under supply and demand. We have a limited supply here but a worldwide demand. And making pressures worse, our population is expected to triple by the year 2019. We don’t have a lot more land to build on and based on supply and demand I don’t see prices coming down any time soon. I think we are going to see prices continue to increase next year. They won’t as dramatically in the past but they will continue to increase.

Q: Even with rising interest rates?

A: There is a lot of available money from lenders, interest rates are still reasonable and we have a good stock of inventory. Buyers still seem very confident in the market. And despite the recent ups and downs, as long as the stock market stays above 10,000, it seems to give buyers a great sense of confidence. Sellers may not see things return to the way they were a year ago and that’s a good thing. The market was too crazy at one point, where buyers didn’t have the time to make up their minds about something before having to put money down. At least these days buyers have a few days to think about it.

Q: Are there any economic indicators you follow for a window into the local market?

A: Our market in Los Angeles is still very much fueled by the movie industry. A lot has to do with how well Hollywood does. When Hollywood thrives, our business thrives. The majority of our clients, if they aren’t in the entertainment industry, are one degree separated from the industry. When box office numbers are up everyone does well and it makes our market more robust.

Q: OK, but studios have been consolidating, most recently with Sony planning to buy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. Does the industry still have a widespread impact on the housing market?

A: As long as they are able to make money and they have good box office receipts, it seems to spur buying activity in our marketplace. Both Sony and Twentieth Century Fox have announced they are going to increase the number of films they make. So if they are making more films, they are employing more people, which means we’ll have more buyers looking for more homes.

Q: Entertainment industry clients are known for being demanding. Any horror stories?

A: We try to be discrete about our clients. Generally, they can be easier than normal clients. They are artistic so they’ve got good eyes when it comes to visual stuff. I would say in some ways they make their decisions quicker than most. When they see something they want, they want it. Many don’t have financial considerations. They also don’t have a lot of time they have very busy careers so they make pretty quick decisions.

Q: What does the future hold for housing in Los Angeles?

A: We’re going to have to start to building residential on top of commercial. We’re about the only large urban center that doesn’t have mixed-use in the amounts that other large urban centers have.

Q: Won’t becoming more like Chicago or New York change the character of Los Angeles?

A: Yes, but slowly. There will still be communities, they will have individual natures. It will just be a matter of having residential stuff and commercial stuff blended together.

Q: Where did you get your start?

A: Between 1979 and 1987 I worked for small boutique firm in Beverly Hills called June Scott & Associates. I got a lot of training there. They taught me how to negotiate and the art of selling houses.

Q: What were some of those lessons?

A: I learned my place in the deal. We’re basically the conduit between the buyers and the sellers. There are a lot of parts to a transaction. It’s about being fair and treating everyone with human consideration, whether they’re a fellow agent, a buyer or a seller. We really have a fiduciary responsibility to everyone. Also, clients have choices. Let them make decisions and do not try to put a square peg in a round hole because it will never fit.

Q: You went out on your own with two partners.

A: Yes, when I started the company, there were three partners. One of them, Craig Brown, I bought out in 1991, and the other one, Lisa Coffin, is still with me today.

Q: What made you three go out on your own?

A: We felt real estate could be done in a collaborative way where we could cooperate with each other and we just weren’t seeing that anywhere else in the marketplace. We wanted to create a company of cooperation and collaboration.

Q: Why wasn’t it collaborative already?

A: Back in the days before we started, if I had just shown a house and my client didn’t like it and I came back to the office I wouldn’t tell other agents about it. We felt that if my client didn’t like it I should come back to the office and say, ‘Hey, you know I just saw a great house down the street, my client doesn’t like it but maybe you’ve got somebody for it.’ We found we worked so much better together than we did as individuals.

Q: Do you still sell houses?

A: I wish, I really wish. I miss it terribly. I always enjoyed the search aspect of it. Unfortunately, I haven’t sold a home in almost four years now.

Q: What was your most memorable sale?

A: I sold a house to friends of mine. I didn’t like the house but they did. They ended up living there for 10 years, they loved it, and I ended up selling it for them for twice what they paid for. I learned that I had to remove myself from the process and it was all about them and what they wanted and not about what I wanted. You have to trust the customer to make the right decision for themselves.

Q: Is that a lesson you teach your agents?

A: All the time. It’s about what the client wants, not what you want. So when clients would say to me, ‘What do you think about this house?’ I would say, ‘You’re the one who’s going to live here, what do you think about this house?’ The focus has to be on what they want.