Mother/Daughter Real Estate Team

Tallahassee.com:

Call the mother-daughter partnership of Realtors Anna Gallagher and Joy Blomeley commercial compatibility. It certainly isn’t shared life experience.

“I can remember sitting in the lobby of a title company coloring while Mom was doing a closing,” Blomeley said of her childhood with a Realtor mother. “A lot of times when Mom would pick me up from school there would be a strange couple in the car, and I’d think, ‘Oh, man, we’re going to look at houses.’”

“Oh, no!” said Gallagher when asked if she felt her daughter, the youngest of her five children, always was destined for a career in real estate sales.

“The very last thing I ever considered,” Blomeley said. “I saw the long hours, the dealmaking, the struggle.”

That was then. This is now. After a successful career as a manager for the Gap, Blomeley and her family returned to Tallahassee in 2004.

“I thought, ‘Why not give real estate a try?’” she said, “but Mom said no.”

Gallagher’s early career as a Realtor was designed “to put food on the table for my babies,” she said. Having arrived in the mid-1960s as the original Dunkin’ Donuts franchise owner, Gallagher opted for real estate in 1977. Again, it was a family-driven decision. “I was working 12 to 14 hours a day, and my children were sleeping on flour sacks in the back.”

The interest rate when she started was 17 percent, a reality that forced her to learn the art of the deal from the ground up. She even would contact potential investors to see if they would be interested in a wrap-around mortgage to help people buy their home. Many of her clients came back over the years and still number among her best friends, she said.

So, in 2004 she thought Blomeley should wait for the boom time to end.

“She said the time wasn’t right. I should get my license and get some education first,” Blomeley said.

“Getting a real estate license is like getting your driver’s license when you’re 16,” Gallagher said. “Everyone wants to rush on out, but that doesn’t mean you have the judgment to drive. It just means you know the law.”

Blomeley describes her mentor-novice partnership with her mother as “the perfect blend. She is the CEO, and I show the houses. There is not a day we’re not communicating.”