When RE/MAX Realtor Nikki Schwarzkopf announced her retirement after nearly 40 years in real estate, her phone “exploded,” she says.
“It was unbelievable. People said, ‘I can’t believe you’re retiring,’ and ‘Congratulations,’ and ‘I’ve enjoyed worked with you all these years.’ It blew me away.”
Schwarzkopf reckons she’s been selling homes long enough to have worked with nearly all of the “old agents” in the city, a designation she applies to anyone who’s been in real estate for 25 or more years.
At 75, she’s also been a Realtor long enough for her career to have touched dates and events that have gone down in history.
She ushered Dr. Henry McDonald, a former head of NASA’s Ames Research Center, and his wife on a tour of local homes the morning of Jan. 28, 1986 – the day the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart during its flight, killing all seven crew members.
“He’d worked with all of those people, so he was very emotional, but they had to find a house that day,” Schwarzkopf remembers.
The floodgates open, memories rain down on Schwarzkopf like confetti thrown at a parade honoring her career.
On a humorous note, Schwarzkopf recalls how her yard signs began disappearing after the launch of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, perhaps to protest the involvement of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the coalition forces in the conflict, she laughs.
When Chattanooga broadcast news journalist Jed Mescon did a story about the vanishing signs, media outlets across the country picked up the news.
Schwarzkopf also recalls standing in the office of the RE/MAX brokerage she and Sheila Shipley owned at the time when a woman ran into the building and asked them if they’d seen the news.
That was the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
As Schwarzkopf looks back on her career, these dates and events combine with the faces of the clients she served and the facades of the houses she sold to create a collage of hundreds of memories that fade into and out of view. Something as simple as driving through Chattanooga with her children can trigger these recollections, she says.
“I’ll be driving down the road and tell my kids, ‘Oh, I sold that house.’ A few minutes later, I’ll say, ‘Oh, I’ve been in that house.’ Then I’ll spot another one I sold.”
In each case, Schwarzkopf says she can remember the faces of the people she met while selling the homes, which is no small task given that she’s had a hand in selling about 1,000 homes, she estimates. Bearing this in mind, she hopes people will forgive her for not recalling their names.
“I have a terrible time with names but I remember addresses. People will come up to me in the mall and say, ‘Hi, Nikki, how are you?’ And for the life of me, I can’t think of their name. So I’ll say, ‘How’s the house on Greenwood?’”
At least Schwarzkopf can remember the name of her first client. Mere days after earning a license to sell real estate while living in Kansas City, Missouri, in the early ‘80s, her husband’s employer transferred him to a city in Ohio. Pressed for time, she handled the sale of their house.
The move was not the first for Schwarzkopf and her husband, a veteran of the Vietnam War who worked as an accountant for Central Soya. The couple dated in high school in their hometown of Montpelier, Indiana, (Schwarzkopf says they “went steady”) and then married in 1966 when she was 18.
After he’d completed his time of service in the U.S. Army, the couple moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he began to work as an accountant. The last of five transfers occurred in 1985 and brought them to Chattanooga.
While Schwarzkopf and her husband were living in Kansas City, a neighbor had noted her love of houses and suggested she become a Realtor. She liked the idea, she says, so she earned her Missouri license. She also liked the idea when a neighbor in Chattanooga made the same suggestion, she adds.
“I said, ‘That sounds good. I did it once, I could do it again.’”
Schwarzkopf earned her license in 1986 and went to work for Gloria Sutton, who at the time owned her own brokerage, which operated out of multiple offices in the Chattanooga area.
During the interview, one of Sutton’s brokers, John Cain, asked why she became a Realtor. Her answer floored him, she says.
“I think he expected me to say, ‘Oh, I love looking at houses and working with people.’ But I said, ‘Because I have three kids and I want to make enough money to hire a maid.’”
Although Schwarzkopf became a Realtor to earn an income, she says she became addicted to real estate and likens her early enthusiasm to becoming hooked on a drug.
“After I wrote my first contract, I called Betty Harrison, one of my mentors, and said, ‘I want another one,’” she laughs. “After you do one, you want the next one, and then you want the next one. You fall in love with it.
“And the more business I did, the more I wanted. I just loved what I was doing. I loved talking with the people and showing the houses. And if you love this business, then you stay in it.”
Schwarzkopf soon had made enough money for a maid – and hired one. She did well from the start, she says, and built her business on a foundation of education and hard work.
“I took so many classes, the letters nearly filled my business card. And I held an open house every Sunday, whether it was raining, snowing or hot outside.”
Schwarzkopf also grasped the financial components of real estate, she continues, and did not hesitate to tell someone they couldn’t afford to buy or sell a house.
“I took a new agent with me to the home of a man who was wanting to sell. He wasn’t doing well financially, so I said, ‘You can’t sell your house or replace what you have.’ When we left, the agent said, ‘We’re not supposed to talk someone out of selling a house and buying another one.’ And I said, ‘Yes, we are, because people matter and their finances are the most important thing in their lives. You have to be honest with them.’”
Schwarzkopf worked for Sutton for several years and then joined Y.L. Coker at Prudential on Shallowford Road, where Shipley worked. Later, she and Shipley purchased the RE/MAX franchise in Hixson.
When Billy Weathers, owner of RE/MAX Properties in Chattanooga, asked Schwarzkopf to be his broker, she sold her interest in the Hixson office to Shipley and made what would be her last professional move.
In the years that followed, Schwarzkopf served her profession with the same diligence she applied to her clients. In addition to ascending to the presidency of what is now called Greater Chattanooga Realtors in 2008, she also led the Women’s Council of Realtors, among other volunteer roles. She says, without expounding, that she believed it was important for Realtors to “give back.”
Nineteen years later, Schwarzkopf began to see the proverbial writing on the wall when she fell victim to one of the side effects of a medication she was taking to address an autoimmune disorder. Called Prednisone, her prescription altered her behavior in a way that impacted her work.
In a word, she says, the medication made her “mouthy.”
“I stood behind my agents when things came up. A broker is responsible for everyone in the office; if there’s a problem with the state, for example, it’s your problem, not theirs. And I took care of them. But I had no filter. I was sometimes saying more than I should have.”
The people with whom Schwarzkopf was working stood by her side during this time, she says. When she told RE/MAX Properties owners Beth Brock Dodson and Frances Vantrease to fire her, they refused. And agents like Geoff Ramsey, who calls her “Momma Nikki,” continued to hold her up on the pedestal where they say she belongs.
“I love that woman,” Ramsey says. “She’s smart, funny and kind but also tough as nails. She always encouraged me, but if I stepped out of line – watch out.”
Ramsey says Schwarzkopf made a habit of checking on her agents’ health and emotional well-being – even when she was busy – and “always had their backs.”
On one occasion, Ramsey says, she even likely saved his life.
“I was looking not so good one day, so she took me into her office and told me to go to the ER. I refused and went back to my office – and the next thing I knew, two firetrucks and an ambulance came sliding in, lights flashing and sirens blazing. She had called 911 against my will.”
Ramsey says he was furious with Schwarzkopf as the first responders rolled him out of the office on a stretcher but that his anger subsided during his five-day stay in a local hospital, where he learned his blood pressure had skyrocketed and brought him perilously close to having a stoke.
While Ramsey remains grateful for Schwarzkopf’s intervention that day, he says the way she treated him and the other agents like family over the years is even more meaningful to him.
“Momma Nikki treated me like a son,” he says. “She would lift me up or kick my ass or do both at the same time. Like her last name, she’s the general.”
Schwarzkopf says she didn’t want to quit working – she says she was still as hooked on real estate as ever – but did step down as broker and return to strictly serving clients.
That was three years ago. Schwarzkopf says she’s drawing the curtains on her career today because real estate is changing and she’s not keeping up like she once did.
Plus, she’s seeing more writing on the wall, she says, and it looks familiar.
“I was president of the association during the start of the housing crash,” she explains. “So many people had bought houses they couldn’t afford. And when I look at what’s happening now, it seems to me like we’re heading in the same direction.”
Whether or not Schwarzkopf’s concerns prove to be correct, she plans on enjoying her retirement from the deck of the house she and her husband built among 8 acres of trees in Sale Creek, an unincorporated community located in the far northern reaches of Hamilton County.
While Schwarzkopf plans to spend time with her extended family – which now includes seven grandkids and five great-grandkids – she won’t be traveling abroad, as some retirees do. Her husband saw enough of the world when he served in Vietnam, she says, and prefers to stay in the continental U.S.
That suits her fine, she adds. She likes to wake up, get dressed and read murder mysteries on her front porch anyway. By the afternoon, she can usually be found turning pages on the deck off the back of her house.
And checking her phone like she’s still working. These days, most of the messages she receives still express disbelief in her retirement.
“People say they can’t believe that many years have gone by,” she says. “Neither can I.”