Welcome to my website. My name is Karen Harmon. I moved to Florida from Pennsylvania when I was 20 and have lived in the Central Florida area ever since. I worked my way through college part-time at night. After many years, I received my Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration with an Accounting major. I went on to become licensed as a Certified Public Accountant.
I got married later in life at the age of 36 and a year later gave birth to my son. At that time, my boss kindly allowed me to work part-time from home. I have been working for this CPA firm for 26 years, 19 of them part-time from home.
During the time my son was young, I learned that I could get him to nap by driving him around the local neighborhoods. As I started to see distressed properties during these drives, I learned that I could make a small finder’s fee by passing on the leads to real estate investors. I soon found that I was making little money for a lot of work, especially compared to what the investors were making. This encouraged me to become a Realtor so I could find investment properties for myself.
This venture did not start out very well. We began investing just before the real estate market crashed and got stuck with two properties that we had to rent for many years until the market values went back up. Being the strong-willed person that I am (my husband says stubborn), I continued to find, rehab and flip properties. After about 14 years, I have successfully flipped 25 homes. I found that being a numbers person definitely helped me in the rehab business by knowing all my costs before I purchased the properties.
As I am getting older and in my mid-50s, the rehabbing has become less attractive for a number of reasons. My body doesn’t want to do what it used to, it is harder to find the necessary spreads, and the higher prices in today’s market are riskier. For this reason and because my husband has retired and is home to handle the needs of my two teenagers, I have decided to diversify and focus on listing homes at a discounted rate.
I always felt that the normal 3% commission to list a property was high. If I wouldn’t want to pay that much, why should I expect others to? I like people and want to help them while making some money in the process. So, I decided to try to get a small piece of the pie by helping home owners sell their homes at a reduced commission of 4.5% – that’s 1.5% for me as the listing agent and 3% for the buyer’s agent.
I also received my certification as a New Home Co-Broker so that I can guide people thru their new construction home purchase. The builders will not sell their homes to you for less if you don’t have a Realtor, so you might as well have a Realtor to be your advocate and help you navigate the process. As a thank you for allowing me to represent you, I will give you $2,500 in cash at closing towards the purchase of your new home.