Editorial
Front Page - Friday, April 23, 2010
From Realtor, to mother and back again: three decades
David Laprad
Harriet Cash is an affiliate broker at Liberty Commercial Real Estate Company, located on Shallowford Road. She negotiates short sales with banks in addition to handling traditional listings.
- David Laprad
Harriet Cash obtained her real estate license in California 25 years ago, primarily out of an interest in becoming an investor. Then she discovered she wanted to do something else for a while: be a wife and a homemaker. Today, she can look back on 27 years of experience as a mother, but just five as a Realtor.
She doesn’t regret the disparity. “Being home was rewarding, and my children would tell you having me there for them had a positive impact on their lives,” she says.
Cash has three children, all of whom are grown and making their mark on the world. Speaking of them, she sits up tall, her face beaming. “My youngest is studying linguistics in Taiwan,” she says. “She’s conversational in six languages, including Russian, Hebrew, Spanish, Quechua – the language of the ancient Incas – and Mandarin.”
Cash’s oldest son, a network engineer, lives in Chattanooga, which is closer to home; her middle child, an AutoCAD designer, lives and works in Denver.
Although Cash has raised her children, nudged them out of the nest and is free to pursue a career in real estate, there’s a part of her that misses being a hands-on mother. “I tell everyone I have three children and wish I had three more,” she says, laughing.
Cash has more than enough work to keep her busy, though. As an affiliate broker at Liberty Commercial Real Estate Company, located on Shallowford Road, she negotiates short sales with banks, to help people avoid foreclosure, and handles traditional listings.
“A homeowner might be upside-down, meaning the loan on his home is greater than the value of the home,” she says. “The projection is that more than 50 percent of all homeowners will be upside down by 2011.
“So a short sale is a sale in which the homeowner is behind on a payment, or about the fall behind, and we negotiate with the lender for a reduced payoff. That helps the homeowner escape foreclosure, and since every foreclosure costs the lender $65,000 to process, it helps them, too.”
Cash’s first experience doing a short sale occurred about a year-and-a-half ago, when a property owner who was behind on his payments approached Cash about selling his house. She met the broker at Liberty, Brian Kelley, about six months ago while looking for properties to rehabilitate, saw that short sales were a big part of his business, and asked if she could join his company. It took Cash a while, but she eventually wore Kelley down.
“Harriet is persistent, which is great for the sales business,” Kelly says. “She also has a super personality, and doesn’t mind doing the things other people might not care to do in order to provide for her family. A lot of agents would rather not do short sales, but Harriet will. She also has a fun, energetic sprit.”
Kelly drops a few more superlatives to describe Cash, all of which paint a picture of an optimistic, hard-working agent who strives to succeed as well as help others during challenging economic times.
Although short sales took Cash down an unexpected road, her general approach to real estate has remained unchanged since her abbreviated beginnings in the industry: investment.
“At Liberty, we’re focused on investors,” she says. “They might be building a retirement portfolio based on income properties, they might be rehabbing, or they might just want a good value for their money.”
Cash’s focus on investment properties sometimes results in her listing a unique property. For example, she recently listed Sawyer School, a 6,000 square foot red brick schoolhouse built in 1958. For the past 12 years, it has been home to Greg and Pam Klapp and two of their four children.
Located on 1.9 acres at the intersection of Sawyer Road and Layton Lane on Signal Mountain, the former school has not only been home to the Klapps but also served as the location of their business. Filling what was originally the cafeteria are manual and automatic screen printing presses, an oven and other equipment needed for the Klapp’s printing business. The kitchen has done duty as an office and an ink room, while the room in which the cafeteria staff washed dishes has functioned as a darkroom.
With cows and horses for neighbors to the west, and equally friendly neighbors on the other sides of the property, Cash says the schoolhouse has provided the Klapps with a peaceful setting in which to live and work.
One of boys who grew up in the house, Daniel, now owns a home in Hixson, Cash says. “It was hard for him to adjust to a normal sized house after growing up in a home where each living space was 1,000 or more square feet in size.”
Cash says the property, which is listed for $275,000, will be sold during a “highest bidder sale” on April 28.
While Cash’s résumé includes stints as a homemaker and a Realtor, one constant in her life has been her faith. Although she sells properties for a living, she says her actual job is to do what God wants her to do.
“My purpose in life is to give God glory in everything I do, and to show people the way to have a relationship with their Father, who’s longing for each of us to know him intimately, and to follow his way of life, which he has shown us in his word.”
To that end, Cash has been a member of an “intercessors for transformation” prayer for the past several years and volunteered with Dawson McAllister Live, a Chattanooga-based nationwide hotline ministry for teens.
“Teens are dealing with all kinds of troubling issues today, not the least of which is drugs, but all kinds of addictions, cutting, split families, broken homes – really difficult stuff,” she says. “I have a heart for that.”
Ultimately, everything Cash does is a matter of her heart. It’s why she stopped working to raise her children, it’s why she volunteers at Dawson McAllister when her real estate business could easily fill all of her time and it’s why she finds her work satisfying, even though it’s taken her places she never expected to go.
“I got into real estate with the idea of investing, but it’s satisfying to me to serve people and help them achieve their goals,” she says. “My goal in every relationship is to be a blessing.”
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