Malls might not be the kind of places where people typically have epiphanies, but Valerie Brown was sitting in one in Hamilton County 25 years ago when she saw something that changed her life.
Beginning at age 15 with a job at a Lerner Shops in Eastgate Town Center, Brown had been working nonstop for around 25 years when she was placed on medical leave and given a temporary reprieve from the grind. Given that it was the middle of the week, she’d expected the mall to be nearly empty, but she found it to be buzzing with people leisurely browsing the shops and milling about as though they didn’t have a care in life.
This surprised her, Brown recalls. She’d always toiled in one job or another, and was working in an environment that made her feel caged, so seeing people relaxing on a weekday made her realize there must be another way to live, or at least to earn a living.
“My mindset was work, work, work, and then I saw all these people enjoying themselves in the middle of the week,” Brown remembers. “When my (medical) leave was over, I said, ‘It’s time for me to do something else.’”
As Brown pondered what she could do, a friend suggested she try her hand at financial services. During her training, her friend told her she wasn’t suited for that line of work but she did have an aptitude for sales.
“I felt good about that,” Brown recalls.
The next day, Brown ran into a former acquaintance at the post office. A real estate broker, he asked her if she’d be interested in selling houses. He didn’t have to talk her into it.
“I said, ‘That sounds great,’” Brown remembers.
Twenty-five years later, real estate still sounds great. Brown says she’s not a high roller, but she’s sold a lot of houses and is pleased with the living she makes. She’s also content with the freedom she has.
Brown has her own definition of freedom, of course. While she works all the time, she admits, her license hangs at a small brokerage that places no productivity demands on her, but instead allows her to run her business as she pleases – Southern Home Realtors, a minority-owned real estate company established in 2003.
Plus, “working all the time” from her home feels different from the kind of “working all the time” she used to do, Brown smiles.
“I was working in retail in Memphis when my family came to see me for Christmas,” Brown says of one of her pre-real estate occupations. “I worked the entire time. I couldn’t go home to see them.”
After chucking her retail career, Brown worked as a clerk at the juvenile court in Hamilton County for 12 years. Punching in codes to enter secured areas made her feel walled in, she says.
“Any excuse I could use to get out of the office, I’d use,” Brown laughs.
Brown built her real estate business on word-of-mouth. Instead of advertising, she initially relied on referrals and focused on serving her clients well, she says. She later went from helping the people her broker sent her way – as well as the people who knew her through her family’s day care service – to drawing from a pool of established customers.
“I’ve never advertised,” Brown says. “I know people who know a lot of people.”
Brown’s people currently includes a stable of investors who flip properties. She says they make her life interesting.
“Some of the stuff my investors buy is something else, so I have to slip on my boots,” Brown laughs. “But after they fix up a house, they list it with me.”
A hard worker, Brown has never stopped selling homes since the day she earned her license. Even when real estate dipped, she plowed through the valleys.
The housing crisis of the late 2000s and early 2010s did force Brown to work an additional job, but she says she was fortunate to find employment she loved – serving as a housing counselor at Catholic Charities. Although she originally intended to work at the nonprofit until houses started selling again, she kept the job for seven years.
“I did consider retiring my license while I worked at Catholic Charities,” she confesses. “But then I’d pass by a house with a for sale sign in the yard, and I’d think ‘I can’t quit.’ I love what I do.”
A born and bred Chattanoogan, Brown spent her first 12 years growing up on Holly Street in what she calls Bushtown – a section of Chattanooga she describes as being near the juvenile court on East 3rd Street.
The portion of the street on which Brown and her family lived is no longer there, as it was bulldozed as part of an urban renewal effort, she says, but she and her family were living in Brainerd by that time.
While a member of a distributive education class at Brainerd High School, Brown worked in the credit department at Sears. She enjoyed the job so much, she continued to work there during summer and winter breaks in classes at Middle Tennessee State University.
Working at Sears sparked an interest in retail buying in Brown, who studied merchandising and marketing at MTSU. After laboring in a series of exhausting retail management positions in Knoxville, Atlanta and Memphis, she returned to Chattanooga, where she landed a position at Hamilton County Juvenile Court.
All of that is water that’s long passed under the proverbial bridge, says Brown, who smiles as she notes that she’ll mark her 25th anniversary in real estate this September. Although she still fills her days and evenings with work, she says it’s a pleasure – even when she has to slip on her boots.
“All I do is real estate. I do a little traveling, but I’m happy to always stay busy. When things slow down, I just keep working.”