Arlene DeVita has been in real estate since 2005, but according to a motto she enjoys that says, “If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life,” she may as well be unemployed. DeVita says real estate is a lot of fun for her, and she feels like it’s the best job in the world.
“I get to meet new people all the time and go and look at properties, and hopefully, I get to make a paycheck from it,” she says. At her real estate home of ReMax Properties North, she enjoys a close relationship with co-workers and is able to differentiate herself as a Realtor with her unique cultural background. DeVita was born in New Jersey as a first generation American from Italian-born parents. She’s fluent in the language and close to her family in Italy that she visits at least once a year.
Although there isn’t a big population of Italians in Chattanooga, her background helps her business in that people who live in Chattanooga are curious about Italians, and particularly the food, she laughs. DeVita’s Italian heritage makes her unique and interesting to her clients, which are often asking for her to make them dinner, she says. Cooking since age 11 and with a husband that is a chef and also Italian, DeVita says she certainly can make a good Italian dish. “No self-respecting Italian girl doesn’t know how to make tomato sauce and pasta,” she says.
When DeVita was 17, her parents moved from New Jersey to South Florida where she went to school at Florida Atlantic University and received a degree in education. She taught for a short time before heading into the business world, where she did a little bit of everything including accounting, retail, real estate development and banking. DeVita’s dad, brother and nephew were all contractors, and she was around homes and land during youth, she says. When she was a child, Sunday drives with her family consisted of going out and looking at house plans and land. She has built a couple of houses in Florida and had rental homes. This is part of the reason she says she felt so comfortable in returning to real estate as a full-time Realtor when she came to Tennessee seven years ago.
DeVita got the second highest grade on the TREES test of her class, and jumped headfirst into real estate, which has been lots of fun ever since, she says. She began working with Prudential in 2005, and the first year, she received the Rising Star award for doing the most sales as a new agent. The economy began to hurt a little bit after that, and DeVita had a few deaths in her family that made the period even more difficult. But today she says she is doing great, and this year will actually probably turn out to be one of her best in real estate.
She thinks perseverance has helped her to get where she is today, and putting her clients needs before her own. If clients have to go out nights, weekends and holidays, she says she is out there showing properties and doing what is best for them. Besides encouraging struggling Realtors to brush up on their people skills, she says they have to be prepared to wear a lot of hats if they are going to succeed in this business. “You are a listing agent, a selling agent, a counselor, an advisor and sometimes, you are in-between families and are even mediating,” she says.
DeVita says she has also been aided in her career by the support of her husband. “It’s a different situation when you are the only breadwinner in a house and the market hurts,” she says. “I think that we are in a unique area in Chattanooga that we actually have been less hurt than so many other places in our country.” When DeVita started in real estate she didn’t have a sphere of influence in Chattanooga, so she marketed herself where she came from in New Jersey and South Florida. She was able to bring a lot of people from those areas to Tennessee to buy vacation properties, but as the markets began to drop, the clients from those areas did, too. Luckily, by that time, DeVita’s sphere of influence in Chattanooga was growing and stable.
Even with the personal problems that came into DeVita’s life after she made the change in companies and the difficulty she experienced in keeping her business going and growing, her ReMax family was very supportive, she says. “Even though I had my rough times in real estate, I’ve endured. I’ve made it,” she says. Yet she does caution those who are thinking about selling real estate part-time to consider that it’s a lot harder than it looks. “I think in order to do a good service to your clients, you have to really be a full-time Realtor,” she says. “I think there are so many issues now in real estate in a very difficult market that if you don’t know your area and your business, you do a disservice to buyers and sellers.”
She says it’s even hard for someone who works full-time as a Realtor to keep up with all the different forms, rules and changes that occur on almost a weekly basis. DeVita is also an International Real Estate Specialist, which means she has completed studies to market properties abroad. This designation is a little different from the ones Realtors typically go for, but DeVita says it diversifies her from other Realtors, and she hopes that at some time in her career, she will be able to do more out-of-state marketing, she says.
DeVita says she actually enjoys taking real estate classes, and especially her continuing education at the GCAR office downtown, not online.
“I think that going downtown to the office to take classes provides a really good way of networking in talking to other agents, (and) there’s class participation where you hear other ideas and other techniques that other agents have used in their transactions,” DeVita says. “I think we do ourselves a disservice by cutting ourselves off and doing everything online.” DeVita spends her free time socializing and cooking with friends. She has even given cooking lessons to some of her friends and clients. She also enjoys decorating and staging homes, especially for the holidays. From sharing her time to sharing her heritage with clients, DeVita has set herself apart as a Realtor in our community.