For Roach, real estate is a great investment

Valerie Roach's career in real estate got started in 1997, after her sons were grown.

"On my street, I had two friends whom I admired that were Realtors at the time, Libby Adkins and Clara Woodrum," Roach said. "They encouraged and helped me with all my questions."

She took some in-house training from Old Colony, and still has the help of technical personnel to keep up-to-date, she said.

So she's been working with Old Colony for 10 years and selling houses in Lawrence County, Ohio, and Putnam, Kanawha and Cabell counties in West Virginia.

Her advice for anyone starting in the business is to have a savings of at least three to six months income to cover your bills while you're getting established.

"It takes awhile to create your first closing," Roach said.

One quality that's necessary for a Realtor is to have good people skills.

"Enjoy working with people," she said. "It takes time finding the right home for the right buyer."

She also said anyone thinking about going into real estate should be ready to work seven days a week. "The business never sleeps," she said.

You might work 12 hours one day, but the good thing about it is that "you're not at the grind of it for 12 hours a day, every day," she said.

She has time to serve on the board of Healing Place, a proposed drug rehabilitation center in Huntington that is in the planning stages. She also has time to spend with her son, Eddie, who suffered an accident and stroke seven years ago and has needed additional treatments over the years to work toward a full recovery.

He is well enough to get involved in the community, going regularly to the Y and volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club. But he still sees specialists, and Valerie Roach says the flexible schedule that real estate provides has allowed her over the past seven years to take him.

"(Real estate) has been absolutely the best thing I could ever do," she said. "One year, I took him to a treatment that was three weeks long, and we went twice that year. I was gone from the area for six weeks, and what other job would allow you to do that?"

She pointed out that when she is gone, though, the income stops. And she added that she does have to pay for advertising, gasoline, license fees, insurance and membership fees to the Huntington Board of Realtors.

But it's great work, Roach said.

"I love the people that I meet. Some of them have become my very best friends," she said. "I work in an office where we all care about each other, which is nice. If somebody is sick, somebody covers for you."

She did express one concern about the business, which is the fact that national news media have painted a bleak picture about the housing market, when that's really not the situation in the Tri-State.

Local market listings were up 7.5 percent in 2007, compared with 2006, and Old Colony's were up more than 9 percent, she said.

"From these figures, you can see that West Virginia is not the typical market," Roach said. "West Virginia has more home ownership per capita than any other state. Also, we are 47th in foreclosures. That means we're low in the number of foreclosures -- not high.

"Real estate has always been a good way to invest your money," she said.