A Rangeville resident looks out the window and spots top Toowoomba Selling Agent Jacqui Walker, installing a signboard on an east-side home just listed for sale.
At the sound of the hammer, Jacqui Walker’s memory casts back to the 1980’s and her days of fixing fences between milking 600 head of Friesian cows day and night.
“Holidays? What holidays?” Mrs Walker laughs, “We worked 8 days a week! That milk truck twice-a-day wasn’t built to wait and we had contracts to fulfil”, she recalls.
“Forgive the pun,” she says, “but looking back, those non-stop seven-day weeks and contracts were ‘udderly’ compatible what I’m doing now!”
“It’s true that if a property is going to sell, sale contracts will terminate if the Sales Agent takes their eye off the ball, so it really was the very best training,” Mrs Walker recalls.
“Hard work definitely secures results – but school wasn’t for me. Dad said I could leave at 15, but I had to get a job first. So I did. The very next day!”
“You name it, I cleaned it at the local Dry Cleaner,” said Mrs Walker, “and it’s there I honed my networking and customer communication skills”.
“I met people I’d do business with decades later,” Mrs Walker recalls.
In the decades between, Jacqui Walker has drawn on her network and unique listening-style to excel in the retail sector in both regional management and ownership roles.
Today Mrs Walker serves on the Board of a local community radio station and she’s an award-winning real estate sales agent heading a team of four male selling agents.
She says she feels especially fulfilled when she sells a home for someone who just eighteen months ago bought it off her for $150,000 less.
“This happened just the other day to a young woman in Wilsonton on the west-side whose strength I admire so much,” Jacqui says. “She can do anything … every woman can”.