Whenever opportunity has knocked on Garrett Cox’s door, he’s answered.
He answered when Northwestern Mutual in Chattanooga offered him a chance to begin developing his own financial planning practice before he’d even completed his college internship at the firm.
Cox also answered when the owner of his hometown’s Chevrolet dealership – Whitwell, Tennessee’s Gentry Chevrolet Buick GMC – asked him to become its finance and insurance manager. The late Jim Gentry made the offer as Cox was preparing to take on his new role at Northwestern.
Spoiler alert: Cox’s eyebrow-lifting passion for cars – the 27-year-old has already owned nearly 30 vehicles – and the assurance he says comes with prayer led him to accept the position with the Chevy dealership instead.
And Cox answered when the sprawling six-bedroom home in which his childhood best friend had grown up became available for purchase. Cox is single but had his eye on the future – when he hopes to be married – so he jumped at the chance to buy it.
One can picture opportunity’s knuckles becoming bruised from all the rapping. But when Cox switched to real estate after five years with the car dealership, there had been no pounding at his door. Instead, he’d decided to begin creating his own opportunities.
“About halfway through 2021, I felt a calling. A voice was saying, ‘Garrett, it’s time to grow into something of your own,’” Cox recalls. “Once you feel something pulling you away, it’s hard to ignore it.”
Cox considered becoming a mortgage lender because he thought the skills he’d acquired brokering loans for cars would dovetail cleanly into financing home purchases, but he realized he was weary of the lending side of sales, he says.
Real estate, however, caught Cox’s eye and held his gaze. He liked the entrepreneurial nature of the business and believed he could apply the sales tenets he’d learned as a finance and insurance agent to his work as a Realtor.
“Sales isn’t about persuading someone to buy something they don’t want; sales is about helping someone navigate a transaction,” Cox muses. “Before I talked numbers with a customer at the dealership, I asked if they truly liked the car they’d picked. Because the numbers wouldn’t matter if they didn’t.
“Real estate is the same way. I don’t sell houses; houses sell themselves. I represent clients.”
Despite believing a sales career should be service oriented rather than transactional, Cox says he knew he was going to have to sell a lot of homes to replace his income at the car dealership. So, after earning his license and then hanging it at the Crye-Leike branch on Gunbarrel, he says he “hit the ground running” Jan. 1, 2022.
Part of Cox’s all-out sprint involved sitting at a computer and studying the marketing efforts of the top 10 Realtors in Chattanooga. As he examined their use of social media and paid advertising, he says he came to understand the importance of branding himself as a business.
“You can’t be a secret agent; everyone needs to know you’re in real estate,” Cox offers. “So I put myself out there on social media, I did mailouts and I told everyone I knew I was a Realtor.”
Perhaps because Marion County is a small community, Cox says, word about his new vocation spread like flames across a bed of dry leaves. Soon, his former customers from the dealership stopped thinking of him as the local car guy and began to identify him with home sales.
“I’d see someone I know at the grocery store or a restaurant, and they’d ask, ‘How’s real estate going, Garrett?’ That’s my favorite question.”
Although Cox’s extensive sphere in Marion County made marketing himself easy and the work was not entirely foreign to him – real estate offered him at least a tangentially similar role – he says he did hit a learning curve as he gathered speed.
He credits his managing broker, Jennifer Grayson, and the rest of the team at his office with helping him navigate the twists and turns many new agents encounter.
“When I was researching brokerages, Crye-Leike stood out based on what I could see on a computer screen,” he explains. “And finding Jennifer was like unearthing a diamond. I knew she’d help me. I couldn’t have asked for a better transition to a new career. Everyone has been very supportive.”
Grayson, meanwhile, calls Cox a rare talent and a great communicator who can handle multiple clients without jeopardizing the services he provides to each one.
“It often takes Realtors years to develop that skill but it seemed to come naturally to Garrett,” she says.
The numbers Cox tallied in 2022 agree. At the end of the year, he’d closed 28 transactions and just under $6 million worth of real estate. This enabled him to exceed his income from the dealership.
What’s more, Cox’s precipitous rise caught the attention of Crye-Leike’s local vice president, Jeff Nixon, who offered to make him the sales manager at the Gunbarrel office. Cox answered as opportunity knocked and is now training new agents at the branch.
Grayson says she supported Cox’s promotion because she wanted to take advantage of the leadership qualities he’d acquired while working in car sales and that reemerged as he gathered steam in real estate.
“Garrett has freely shared his success and how he runs his business with other agents – including those not affiliated with Crye-Leike. I knew he’d make a phenomenal addition to my office the day we first met.”
As Cox takes on new responsibilities and aims to grow his business in 2023 with the launch of his own team, he’s facing a market that’s more competitive than the one that welcomed him to the business. He says he sees the change as – no surprise here – opportunity knocking.
“When I became a Realtor, making a sale was as easy as taking a breath,” he says. “But as interest rates and inflation rose, people became less certain about buying a home. We’re now seeing some consistency emerge – interest rates are still elevated but have at least remained steady – and the last two weeks have been the busiest of my career.
“The key for me moving forward will be applying the skills I learned during my first year in the business. It’s time for me to be a skilled negotiator and work hard for my clients. From there, everything will fall into place.”
Although Cox continues to work with the fervor of his first day in real estate, his says his experiences in sales have taught him the importance of time off. And for Cox, nothing is as relaxing as caring for his new companion – his 2019 BMW 7 Series Sedan.
“I’ve always wanted to be able to buy that car either new or almost new,” he says with the grin of a man who just struck gold. “She has an extended wheel base and plenty of room in the back for clients. And she can fly.”
After pausing for a moment, perhaps to weigh the wisdom of uttering the last sentence on the record, Cox adds, “Not that I’d ever exceed the speed limit.”
Cox’s BMW allows him to shuttle his clients in style, but when he has heavy lifting to do, he grabs the keys to his 2018 Ford F-150 pickup, a diesel-fueled workhorse he’ll use to haul a boat or materials for a project.
Cox acquired the Ford at Gentry, where he frequently took advantage of his employee discount. While he doesn’t miss sitting at his desk at the dealership, he says he is mourning the loss of his favorite job benefit.
“I got great pricing on new vehicles. I occasionally rolled over some bad equity, but for the most part, I was able to get into a different vehicle every six to 12 months. Obviously, that will change now.”
Of the nearly 30 vehicles Cox has owned, other favorites have included a spanking new Yukon Denali and a Sierra Denali Diesel 2500. His next dream car is a BMW 7 Series with an E12 engine.
He credits his enthusiasm for cars to genetics. “My father was always a big car guy,” he says, still smiling. “So, it’s in my blood.”
Cox then says he loves houses more than cars – even though he’s on only his second one. He purchased his first house close to the start of the pandemic and was able to sell it for a tidy profit last year and buy what he calls his “dream home.”
“I remember when my best friend’s family built it,” he says. “When I bought it, I’d already slept in every room except the master.”
The primary bedroom and the rest of the house now belongs to Cox, who lives there alone with enough space to make Citizen Kane comfortable. He says he hopes to someday fill the home with a family, beginning with a wife.
“I feel like I’ve always been in the right place at the right time,” he says. “She’s out there hunting for me and I know she’ll find me.”
When she does, her arrival will probably sound like a knock on a door. And Cox will likely answer it with the hope opportunity has taught him to expect.