Originally both from the Atlanta area, Connie and Joey Faircloth moved to Dunlap to raise their two girls. Connie made friends with a Realtor who made the job look easy (as good Realtors often do), and so Connie decided to get her own license and try out real estate.
Unfortunately, it was 2007, and the market began to get complicated. Yet Connie worked hard to meet her goals and emphasized quality services. This trait has paid off and earned her the recent Quality Service Team Award for superior customer service and loyalty unsurpassed that will be presented at an April awards ceremony.
Oddly enough, real estate is something Connie said she’d never do after seeing people in the industry working seemingly endless hours and with commitments on top of their commitments. Yet Connie loves her real estate job and has brought her husband Joey into the business to work with the rural properties.
Joey says he does enjoy the land development part of real estate in being able to see raw land and visualize the home that will occupy the space, which seems so difficult for the average buyer. Even more so, he says he enjoys marveling in the realization of the influence the title of Realtor gives in helping people with the most important financial decision of their lives.
Connie believes the more educated sellers are on the market conditions, the better it will be.
“Sometimes you have to tell them things they don’t want to hear, and that’s hard, but it’s reality. If I lose a listing here and there because I am honest, and they haven’t come to that realization of where they need to be in a price range, then sometimes you have to let those go, but most sellers appreciate that honesty,” she says.
Connie also takes her marketing role very seriously, she says, as this market makes advertising a home on the computer
not enough.
“You have to cover all your bases and spend money to advertise your listings or they are just not going to sell,” she says.
With Joey’s business in Atlanta as the main livelihood for the Faircloths, they have not had to cut back on advertising and therefore have been able to provide that seller support that is so crucial in these times.
“You can imagine how difficult it is to be a real estate agent and have to spend money every day, see the market turn as much as it did and to stay committed to spending money,” Joey says. “We have the ability to approach our real estate business differently in that we don’t have to sell something, and don’t have the pressure of feeling like we have to sell something today because of financial commitments. We have a more comfortable base to work from.”
As a team, Connie and Joey work with many couples to provide a more comfortable atmosphere for them as the husband gravitates toward Joey and the wife sticks with Connie. This way, the client pair are able to see both sides of a property from how Connie and Joey perceive it. Clients who are more comfortable with a woman or with a man Realtor can also call the Faircloth team and work with either.
Working with sellers and buyers in Dunlap, the Faircloths are able to highlight many appealing features of the area including its small town feel, yet its mere 30-minute distance from Chattanooga and its closeness to other metropolitan areas like Nashville and Atlanta. The beauty of Dunlap, the quality school system and the centrality of this town is something that Connie and Joey can both promote as voices of experience after their own move from Atlanta, where everything was five minutes away, to this small town.
“I remember shortly after getting here, before our kids went to school, it came to me wondering if all the stereotypes about small towns were true,” Joey says.
This too is a concern of clients coming in from larger cities, but Joey is quick to assure them it’s not a bad switch and helps to ease their minds about branching away from the city.
When Joey had his initial doubts about living in a small town, he got involved in the community by volunteering as the middle and high school football coach as a way to learn the town and to help his daughters be introduced to the community.
A quarterback in college, Joey loves the sport and the camaraderie and teamwork it provides, but also through this endeavor he was able to see the lives behind the boys he coached. Joey says he started to zero in on children in particular need of guidance and began bringing the boys to his house and paying them to work. This developed into community members such as doctors, attorneys and insurance companies calling Joey to ask for help from his boys in odd jobs. Joey stressed that the boys were to be on time, work hard, and be respectful, and from this the boys learned a good work ethic and how to interact with adults. He still keeps in contact with these boys, and some even come looking to him for their first home buying experience.
“I’m going to do this until my girls are done with school, and then it’ll be hard for me to make the decision to quit at some point in time, because now its not about the girls. It’s now about the impact the boys get out of it, and I get as much out of it as they do,” Joey says.
Although the Faircloths are confident the market will turn around in the next five or 10years, they know that until then, the road will be tough for everyone.
Connie suggests that clients let their Realtor educate them, and listen to their advice, even if it is a hard pill to swallow. The Faircloths experience also would make them likely to agree that the benefits of small towns that Realtors speak highly of are definitely worth listening to.