(CHEROKEE LAKE REALTY WRITES A WEEKLY COLUMN FOR THE GRAINGER COUNTY JOURNAL NEWSPAPER. THIS WAS A RECENT QUESTION ASKED BY A READER.)
Well… the name says it all. Kentucky Fried Chicken serves chicken. Taco Bell serves tacos. Cherokee Lake Realty sells real estate in the Cherokee Lake area.
Cherokee Lake is surrounded by four counties. Grainger, Hamblen, Hawkins, and Jefferson Counties. So, there’s your answer. We concentrate on these four counties. This is a pretty vast area. I am licensed to sell real estate in the entire state of Tennessee, but as I wrote last week, I specialize in locations that I am familiar with. Very familiar with. I am not a local, as they say, but I have lived in the Cherokee Lake community for 31 years. I live on the Grainger side of the lake and have cruised all around the surrounding counties by boat. Have researched, explored, listed, and/or sold properties all over Cherokee Lake. I can’t say that about the other lakes in the TVA system. And I truly believe Cherokee Lake is the finest TVA lake, that is why I settled here three decades ago.
Now, just like Taco Bell serves other Mexican food items besides tacos, we have listed properties for sale in other counties. Sevier, Cocke, Knox for example. Why? A recommendation or referral by a previous client is one example. Even then I research the location and confirm that we can provide proper representation. If I don’t feel comfortable listing the property, then we will pass. And I am happy to report that every single property we have listed in these other counties has successfully sold for the owners. And by successfully, I mean getting the owners the sales price they were seeking. Any real estate agent can sell a property if all they do is constantly reduce the sales price. I see this repeatedly. That’s not selling. If the price was too high to begin with, why was it listed at that price? This can turn into a whole new column to write about so I will leave that subject for another week.
But, again, I prefer staying close to home. Close to an area that we can represent by knowing it well. By successfully selling properties in this market over and over again. As they say, you don’t get really good at something by doing one thousand things one time, but by doing one thing a thousand times. I recently saw a commercial on the company that is considered the number one chainsaw manufacturer, STIHL, that expresses this sentiment in a similar way… “When you spend a hundred years building chainsaws, you get really good at building chainsaws.” Cherokee Lake Realty hasn’t been selling properties in the Cherokee Lake area for a hundred years. But I’d like to think we’re getting close.
