I’ve always been blessed with opportunities to help people, which is so rewarding. I ran a therapeutic horse farm and a safe house for foster kids. I ended up adopting one of the foster kids. It taught me how important relationships are, and now I consider my real estate clients family. I really do.

 

I grew up in a small town in Virginia. I was adopted by my grandmother. We grew up poor, but we didn’t know we were poor because everyone around us was poor, too. I never remember wanting something I didn’t have. We had a garden and Grandma Spencer fed the whole neighborhood. A lot of times it was pinto beans and a piece of corn bread, but you never went hungry.

 

Before I got into real estate, I owned a therapeutic horse farm with 22 horses in North Carolina. My partner and I bought 30 acres on old tobacco land and turned it into a ranch. We boarded and trained horses, then started giving riding lessons. This one little girl with fetal alcohol syndrome asked if her classmates could come out to see the horses, and of course we said yes. That’s when we started doing therapeutic riding for physically, mentally and emotionally challenged kids. We worked with 125 children.

 

I’ll never forget this one girl named Alicia. She was in a motorized wheelchair and had to be strapped in or she’d throw herself out of the chair. While the other kids were riding, she would bite herself and make noises. She didn’t talk. One day, her grandmother signed the waiver for her to ride, and I was scared to death. We put her on a horse and I told everyone to gather around her to make sure she doesn’t fall off. She got on that horse and she sat straight up and just started riding. She laughed the entire time and we couldn’t stop taking pictures of her. We walked the horse twice around the ring and then helped her back in the wheelchair. She was smiling the entire day.

 

 At that time, we also decided to become a safe house for foster kids. We took in foster kids in emergency situations. This one little six-year-old kid named Austin was the first to come and stay with us. His mother had him when she was fifteen years old and she was an addict. Austin stayed with us a long time and we just fell in love with him. We went through the adoption process to adopt him as our son. It took four years, but it finally went through.

 

His mother found out where we lived and threatened to kidnap him so we had to come up with a plan to protect him. My partner had been to Albuquerque, New Mexico, before and thought it might be a good place to start over. One of our students’ fathers was interested in buying the farm from us right around that time, so we saw it as a great opportunity. We drove to Albuquerque with Austin, found a house and moved in thirty days later. We all fell in love with the Southwest – the Native American culture, the art, the pottery. A year later, my partner died of lung cancer. So here I was, a single parent with a nine-year-old son. I didn’t know what I was going to do for work.

 

I thought if I became a real estate agent, I could put Austin first and have a flexible schedule. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. What I love about this business is the ability to meet total strangers and make them part of my family. I have three clients who asked me to  be the godfather to their children. Of course, I said yes and now the kids call me Uncle Tracy. To me, that’s the highest honor I could have.

 

My grandmother taught me so much about life and about giving and living within your means and respecting others. I’ve been a real estate broker for sixteen years, and I embrace all those life lessons when helping my clients. I really enjoy working with people who have never owned a home. To sit down and be able to show them how the money they’ve paid in rent could’ve paid their house payment is really eye-opening for them. And then I help them find the perfect place. It’s rewarding to help people accomplish that – when they see the home and love it and make it theirs. They plant a tree or a rosebush, and it’s really heartwarming to me. I love to send out anniversary cards to my clients on the date they closed on their house. It’s a date worth remembering. 

 

Chickens remind me of my grandmother because we had chickens growing up. And I still have chickens today and named one of them after her. She’s a red-headed, feisty hen named Grandma Spencer.