Thomas Warren: Webs of Goodwill and the Power of Can You Help Me
Thomas Warren spent 13 years as a high school English teacher and varsity soccer coach before real estate ever entered the picture. He's now managing partner at JLG Charlottesville, and his path to get there involved building a business from nothing twice, in two different cities, with two very different outcomes.
The Sale That Changed Everything
Thomas and his wife had renovated a fixer upper, and by year seven of his teaching career, a safety scare involving their toddler learning to open doors onto a busy cut-through street pushed them to sell. The check he received for the profit and equity from that sale exceeded his entire teaching career's earnings, paid out in a single day. That was the moment real estate stopped being abstract and became, in his words, the thing that runs through the American dream.
Starting From Almost Nothing in Atlanta
Two sisters already working as agents, one of whom was on the Justin Landis Group team, helped point Thomas toward the business. But when he and his family relocated to Atlanta, despite having gone to high school there years earlier, he had almost no warm relationships to build on. Looking back at his first five transactions, only one came from a genuine referral. The rest came from lukewarm connections he built up from scratch, including, memorably, an AT&T fiber technician who sat on his porch for three hours during an installation and ended up buying a house from him six months later.
Eight Months, Then One a Month
Thomas's first transaction in Atlanta took eight months of consistent, sometimes frustrating effort. Once it closed, the pace changed almost immediately, and he averaged roughly one closing a month for the rest of his time there. Eighteen months in, with momentum clearly building, including 251 houses in his own neighborhood door knocked three separate times, he and his family decided to move back to Charlottesville. Walking away from a business that was finally taking off was a genuinely hard call.
Doing It the Second Time, On Purpose
Starting over in Charlottesville, Thomas was far more targeted than he'd been in Atlanta. He already knew his value proposition: an experienced team, premier level service, and the ability to learn a new market fast, since he no longer had to spend energy figuring out how to market himself from zero. That clarity let him build one focused pillar for his business rather than trying every tactic at once.
Social Events: His One Big Focus
Thomas calls his approach social events, and labels every related entry on his calendar with the letters SE. It's an umbrella covering one-on-one coffees, lunches, group hangouts, trivia nights, and rejoining his old adult soccer league. The common thread is FaceTime, and Thomas is candid that this approach plays specifically to a personality trait: he genuinely enjoys being in front of people, which he sees as part of what made him effective as a teacher and coach in the first place. He's clear it isn't the right formula for everyone, it works because it matches who he actually is.
The Three Question Framework
Thomas built a simple structure for every relationship he invests in: can we hang out, can I help you, and can you help me. He calls the third one the most powerful, and the hardest for him to learn. For the first 15 years of his adult life, he says he never let himself ask for help, he just ground through everything alone. Learning to genuinely ask, and receive help, transformed how quickly his relationships turned into real business, and he credits that same dynamic as the underlying power of working on a team.
Webs of Goodwill
Thomas describes his referral business as three overlapping webs. The soccer community, built from years of playing and coaching before he was ever a realtor, has produced five closings and two active clients in the past 12 months alone. A single coffee with a local property manager he met at an association event turned into an introduction chain that's now connected him to roughly 200 people, two closed or active clients, five more in the pipeline, his most trusted lending partner, and a seat on the Ronald McDonald House board. His former teaching web, students now in their late twenties, still produces closings and active clients, proof that relationships built purely to help someone, with zero expectation of anything in return, tend to compound over time.
Becoming a Local Celebrity
Thomas argues that becoming a recognizable, trusted figure in your market doesn't require fame, it requires being genuinely known. In Charlottesville, over a decade as a forward facing teacher and coach meant a huge number of people already knew him before real estate entered the picture. The real transition was helping those people see him as a real estate resource. He held a grand opening for JLG Charlottesville and invited 60 people from his own sphere specifically so a partner from Atlanta could vouch for him publicly, since third party credibility carries far more weight than self-promotion ever could.
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Justin Landis is the founder of Justin Landis Group and Bolst, two of Atlanta's leading real estate companies. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and three daughters and has been selling Atlanta real estate since 2008.
