Wendy Johnson didn’t initially harbor dreams of becoming a Realtor.
Working in healthcare for almost 20 years, Wendy says she “decided I just was kind of done with that scene” and began working for a friend as a buyer’s agent in Manassas in 2016. After a few
years, she looked to make a move and her search saw her end up at Ross Real Estate, a
much more convenient location given that she was living in the town of Warrenton at the time. “I started interviewing brokerages and I sat down with Tyler after encouragement from Marina [Marchesani, Associate Broker at Ross Real Estate] to do so, and we just hit it off.”
At Ross Real Estate, Wendy can handle either side of the deal and prides herself on being able to establish a fair and cooperative effort with her buyers. “I’ve never been that agent that tells my buyers that they need to nitpick a seller apart,” she says. “But I also believe that everyone should educate themselves about the home that they’re purchasing. I personally have never bought a home and not done a home inspection, even if it was just for informational purposes. And if there were some little issues with it, that I had a checklist to go off of."
“I try to make it as easy as possible for my buyers and my sellers when it comes to negotiating and getting quotes and those sorts of things.”
As a benefit of what she calls Ross Real Estate's “boutique” style of brokerage firm, Wendy is able to offer a personalized approach to each transaction. This includes her passion for making any and every property shine from a visual aesthetic perspective: “I really enjoy staging properties and helping folks get their properties to where they need to be for photographs and listing,” she says. “Last year, I helped a great friend of mine - her father had owned a property since the 80s, and had at one point torn down the original structure and rebuilt, but it was still out of date and it just needed a facelift."
“Initially, I was just going to help her do that and prepare. And it snowballed into, we did so much to the property and I had known it so intimately that I ended up listing it for her. I picked everything from the wall color to the flooring that went in, countertops, [painting] the cabinets. And I helped her locate contractors to the best of my ability just by networking and it was an area that was outside of my footprint, so it was a learning experience for myself and I had to get a little bit creative when it came to listing it.”
Wendy has lived in Fauquier County for more than a decade and credit’s the brokerage’s strong local roots for its ability to establish a presence in the scenically attractive Piedmont region. Additionally, she notes the welcoming environment that the area provides as something that stood out to her after moving from Delaware:
“I’ve always said that our county, when people come from different areas, it’s very accepting of new people and folks from different areas. [It’s] very inviting, everybody waves at everybody.”
Written by Eric Hobeck
Photograph by Molly Peterson