Christine Todd, CEO for the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors, got into the world of real estate by accident.
The New York City native started her career as a public school teacher and after a brief stint as a property manager, made the leap to real estate with a job at the Greater Boston Real Estate Board.
“Someone noticed me and said I’d be perfect for association work,” Todd said. “I said, ‘I’m not even sure what association work is.’ ”
But Todd — who was never a Realtor herself — eventually accepted the job and “fell in love” with the industry, which, it turns out, isn’t all that different from working with her students. Just as with her teaching gig, Todd’s initial assignment with the Boston Real Estate Board was to plan and execute educational seminars for the members.
“Perhaps my background as a high school teacher, where I was working with unruly students and still getting the job done, gave me the skills I needed to work with thousands of Realtors, all with different opinions, and still reach a consensus and move forward,” Todd said.
Todd, who became a certified association executive in 1983, moved to the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors in 1989. The association was the largest at the time, and Todd, who was picked from a field of 350 candidates, was the first woman to be hired for the top job.
“It was quite a traumatic move for me,” she said. “A woman had never held the position. When the announcement came out, they must have thought I had broken through the glass ceiling.”
Today, Todd oversees a membership of more than 13,000 Realtors and is steering the Northern Virginia real estate community through some rocky times. The housing market has cooled significantly over the past year as Northern Virginia comes down from four years of record-high prices.
“In the last four years, Northern Virginia and the entire region went through a tremendous boom. There’s no doubt about it,” she said. “You couldn’t have invested anywhere else and made more money. We all felt wealthy.”
But Todd is taking a realistic view on the future of the real estate market, even as others in the industry try to cast a sunny picture.
“Some are saying it’s a soft landing,” she said. “I say it’s more of a medium landing. It’s not going to crash because our economy is still good … but we’re waiting for sellers to catch up to reality and to price their property in accordancewith today’s market. And unfortunately, some sellers are reluctant to do that.”
