As Crystal Poole looked up from the floor of her grandmother’s house to where the roof had been only moments earlier, she thought it was snowing.
Then her thoughts cleared and she realized she was watching tiny flakes of insulation drifting down from the gap a large tree had made as it crashed into the single-story home during a summer storm.
It had been a calm day in South Chattanooga until a sudden surge of strong winds and rain had sent Poole scrambling to move her car out of the driveway to avoid limb fall. When she heard a loud cracking noise as she was stepping back inside, she turned to look behind her, expecting to see a toppled tree where her vehicle had been. Instead, she saw the floor rushing up at her, or something to that effect, she recalls of the July 2023 incident.
“The storm had ripped a tree in the backyard out of the ground,” remembers Poole, 37. “It hit the house so hard I fell.”
Poole was not alone – her grandmother, mother and 11-year-old son were also inside the home. As she led them to the front door, dripping wet from her excursion outside, live wires spit sparks from the tangle of branches and splintered lumber above their heads.
While Poole’s mind was recording these details for posterity, a childhood memory bloomed from the chaos. She was at most a toddler and was climbing into the lap of her father, who died of a heart attack when she was 2. It was one of two memories she has of him. In the other, she’s at his funeral, gazing at him in his casket and thinking he’s sleeping.
Then Poole was clutching her son in her arms and counting her blessings. The house and everything in it was in ruins but her family was alive.
Life as it happens
A bus driver and dispatcher for Hamilton County Schools, Poole says she spent years playing the cards she believed life had dealt her. A single mother to a boy whose father had been murdered when the child was 1, her regular routes and steady paycheck made life predictable, if not exciting.
Poole’s routine included watching house hunting shows as a way to relax. While she liked watching the Realtors guide people through the process of selecting a new home and then negotiating a good deal for her clients, she says the shows eventually started to needle her thinking and she began to feel as if she was living a life of unspent potential.
Born and raised in South Chattanooga by her mother and grandmother, Poole graduated from 21st Century Academy and then earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee. At the time, she aspired to become an anesthesiologist.
This was no pipe dream; the school’s chemistry program was a beast and challenged Poole intellectually, but she graduated summa cum laude, or as the Romans said, “with highest honor.”
“Chemistry was a battle,” Poole states without irony or humor. “I don’t love pressure, but I also don’t care to admit I can’t do something. The fact that chemistry was hard made me determined to learn it. I don’t like to feel defeated.”
That said, Poole discarded her plans to attend medical school and followed college with a medical assistant certificate instead. A job was waiting for her in Atlanta when she was involved in a serious vehicular accident and discovered she was pregnant.
”I’ve been in Chattanooga ever since,” Poole says, again without humor or irony.
While pregnant, Poole made frequent use of Chattanooga’s public transit system, known as CARTA (Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority). After one of the drivers became familiar with Poole’s history, the individual expressed admiration for her resiliency and asked her if she’d ever driven a bus.
”I said, ‘No, but it doesn’t look hard,’” Poole remembers. Looking back, she concedes that driving a bus does have its moments.
“People with a variety of personalities ride the bus, and when they cop an attitude, you have to deal with it. You also have to control your bus while focusing on the road. A lot of people think their car can beat all that steel. They’re very, very wrong.”
When Poole wasn’t working, she often found herself watching one of the house hunting shows she liked and picturing herself in the role of the Realtor.
“I’d think, ‘That agent made a lot of money selling that house. Could I do that?’ And then life happened and I kept working.”
Poole transitioned into a supervisory role at CARTA after the killing of her son’s father to stabilize her income. By that time, the Chattanooga she’d seen from the driver’s seat of a bus had opened her eyes to a world in which many people had been dealt a harsher hand than she.
“The buses start early in the morning, and as you’re driving through downtown, you’ll see a lot of people sleeping on benches or the sidewalks,” Poole says. “That made me think about my son and how I wanted to get in a position where I could buy a house of our own.”
Poole’s daily encounters with people experiencing homelessness also stirred thoughts about how she could one day help.
“There are a lot of abandoned buildings and a lot of people sleeping on the streets in Chattanooga,” Poole remarks. “I want to eventually open a small housing compound for the homeless. Life happens and people don’t have a choice about where they land, and it’s up to the rest of us to pull them up.”
Poole continued to work for CARTA, even as she accepted that she would need to make a bold move if she were to realize her dreams of homeownership and serving the homeless. As she looked down at the cards she held in her hand, she realized they were the same cards she’d been staring at since she was 24, and she began to think more intently about real estate.
“I wanted to be my own boss, I wanted to spend more time with my son and I wanted to start building wealth for my family, but I kept telling myself I had to wait because I didn’t have the time or money.”
Then came the day Poole was sitting in her car outside CARTA’s dispatch office and decided it was time to throw the switch.
Hard lesson in real estate
“I didn’t have the money I needed to pay for the class, but I signed up for it anyway,” Poole says, a smile born of a proud memory brightening her eyes.
Poole earned her license in April 2023 and then closed her first sale in June. Days later, the storm kicked her and her family in the teeth.
What followed was the best lesson she’s learned in real estate, Poole says. As she and her loved ones began to rebuild, she discovered issues with the home insurance policy that covered her grandmother’s house. Critically, the payments they received fell tens of thousands of dollars short of the damages.
Now Poole urges her buyers to read their home insurance policies slowly and with a magnifying glass. “There’s a lot of fine print and clauses that people miss,” she cautions.
Poole used the money she’d saved to purchase a home for her and her son, Christian, to help lift her family out of the wreckage the storm had left in its wake. The foursome rebuilt a new home from the ground up on her grandmother’s property – an experience that schooled Poole in the finer points of working with contractors, inspectors and more – and moved in early this year.
Poole came away from the ordeal with a fresh perspective on living life as it happens.
“People should appreciate what they have in the moment. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate what I had or that I complained, but I used to say, ‘I need this,’ or, ‘My son needs that.’ But after I lost everything, I realized I had enough.”
Taking life by the horns
As Poole approaches two years in real estate, she’s relishing her role as a buyer’s and listing agent on a major team as well as the opportunity to learn more about home sales and even commercial work from her leader.
Poole joined the Barrott Team at Keller Williams Realty Greater Chattanooga this year and quickly impressed her boss, Sarah Barrott, with her empathy, dogged work ethic and determination to succeed.
“Crystal has great empathy for others, which meshes well with a service-oriented career,” Barrott says. “She also works hard and is determined to succeed, which is a necessity in this industry.”
“People think real estate is easy; you show a house and collect a check,” Poole muses. “But this business takes hard work and dedication. You’re not handed anything; you have to go get it.”
Barrott adds that Poole is also intelligent and thinks through matters before acting.
“She wants to do things right the first time.”
Poole returns the credit to Barrott, who provided the motivation and encouragement she needed as she rebuilt her life, she says.
“I felt like I was losing myself in the aftermath of the storm and I needed someone to push me to where I needed to be. Sarah was the one who did it.”
As Poole turns her gaze from yesterday to tomorrow, she’s thinking ahead to what’s next. No longer content to play the cards life deals her, her plans including starting her own team or brokerage, purchasing homes to rent and buying a plot of land where her family can settle.
“I can picture all of us living together in a small community,” she smiles. “Having the people I love close by would mean the world to me.”