Uniontown Realtor is named Rookie of the Year for 2021
A Uniontown real estate agent has been named the Rookie of the Year from the Fayette County Board of Realtors, but her personal accomplishments have stretched over generations.
As a child, Karen Ransaw looked up to her grandmother, Betty J. Walker.
Ransaw said Walker owned 20 rentals in Uniontown, and Ransaw would watch her grandmother conduct her real estate business with pride as being a Black role model that Ransaw wanted to emulate.
“I would watch her work on them while she’d teach me the business,” Ransaw said.
However, Ransaw’s grandmother also struggled as she faced redlining, a discriminatory practice that puts services out of reach for residents of certain areas based on race or ethnicity.
Ransaw said her grandmother wanted her to be the first person in the family to go to college, which Ransaw did, earning a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from California University of Pennsylvania in 2013.
“I did nothing with that degree,” Ransaw said, adding that she wound up selling cars at LBSI Automotive in Uniontown and came to decide that selling vehicles wasn’t for her.
The same year she graduated from college, her grandmother died, but Ransaw was later brought back to that world when she purchased a house in 2020. Seeing what the real estate agent did, she fell back in love with the process and wanted to do it for others.
First, she had to take classes to obtain her real estate license, and received her license in February 2021.
“It was very hard at first in the beginning – three months in and nothing was happening,” Ransaw said, adding that she watched herself go broke day by day before calls finally started coming in and she started making sales.
Ransaw also used the opportunity to become more civic-minded and to get her name out. She became involved in community service and activities like clothing donations, chamber of commerce events, health fairs, ribbon cuttings and other activities, and was also named to the Uniontown Zoning Hearing Board.
An employee with Coldwell Banker Laurel Ridge Realty, Ransaw has racked up an impressive list of accomplishments, including most listings for June and September 2021, and most sold for July and August 2021, and is a multimillion-dollar producer with the company.
Most recently, she was named the 2021 Rookie of the Year from the Fayette County Board of Realtors.
“I was very surprised and overwhelmed with joy, and I feel like I made my family in heaven proud,” Ransaw said, referring to her mother, her Aunt Linda, her grandfather, her brother, for whom she was caregiver before he passed away from cancer in early 2020, and especially her grandmother.
Ransaw is proud to be the first Black woman to ever win the award as a way to honor her grandmother while also appearing as a role model for her 6-year-old daughter, Jeanise Ransaw-Taylor, as well as her 8-year-old son, Shaun Ransaw-Taylor.
She said even through the struggles, she always kept a smile on her face, as she now goes by a new professional name, Karen “Kares” Ransaw.