Tiarra Nero, Real Estate Marketing Manager

Hi, Tiarra! So tell me, what do you do? 

That’s so loaded. (laughs) I am a creative project coordinator for a marketing firm that focuses on real estate. Basically I manage media placements for clients, whether that’s a feature in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, out-of-home signage such as ads on the subway or the Metro North. I also help to manage and coordinate digital marketing, like pay per click ads, social media, and I work with the creative team to ensure that the ads are representative of what the client is looking for and stays on brand. So I’m constantly working with multiple internal teams and the client, as well. It entails a lot of follow-up, paying attention to details, working with vendors, maintaining a good relationship with all parties. There’s an analytical portion, as well, which requires a lot of data analysis to determine how the marketing campaigns have performed. I also do some billing, processing, and contracts.

That’s a lot! Did you go to school for this?

No, actually. I got here by trial and error. It was helpful because that’s how I figured out what works and what doesn’t, and what I like and what I don’t like. In college I majored in fashion merchandising and design, then received my MBA. While in graduate school, my favorite class was marketing. I didn’t know a lot about that space so when I finished school and entered the fashion industry, I entered on the merchant side which was the more business-minded, financial side. It wasn’t very creative, so I kept that in mind as I sought different positions later. 

Before switching industries, my last role in fashion combined buying and marketing, so that helped open the door for me to establish myself as a marketing professional. I managed all marketing for my department, so that was a great opportunity and a lot of exposure. I wanted to stick with marketing, but I didn’t have a role in mind. I looked at different descriptions and researched areas I was interested in, and this came along. Now I’m in real estate. 

Have you had any individuals who were particularly meaningful in helping you determine your career path? 

Not really. I’ve never had a mentor, though I tend to learn from my immediate managers. I’ve always worked with a lot of strong women, and I’ve watched them and taken their best qualities. I was especially eager to learn from them because they were pretty successful in their own right, and passionate. Outside of work, I learn a lot from grandmother. Once I have an idea of what I want to do, I like bouncing ideas off of her when I’m figuring out my next steps. She came from the legal field, but I am still able to learn from her experiences.  

What career accomplishments are you most pleased with? 

Successfully transitioning into a new field and being able to climb the ranks. I set my sights on account management and project management roles, once I found out those were roles that existed within marketing, which I wanted to transition into. I learned about creative marketing and became really interested in that space. So I did my research, and when I liked the job descriptions I came across, I went for it. In my current role, I go between account management and project management. I’m technically a coordinator but I both manage and coordinate depending on the account. 

Do you feel that your educational experiences and prior job experiences in the fashion industry set you up well for what you do now? 

My work experience has really given me the most to work with and been most beneficial because I didn’t study marketing and only took one related class in graduate school. From those earlier work experiences, I have learned how to follow up and maintain relationships, to be meticulous when reviewing contracts. As far as my education goes, it’s been great in terms of networking and learning from people who have similar roles.

Can you describe your experience in your current role?

There have been pain points and learning curves in transitioning to a new role and industry. That part can be a little challenging, but it’s also exciting when I look back and see how much I’ve learned in five months. I’ve learned so much about the real estate industry. When I look back and remember the things I didn’t know how to do that I can now do on my own and do well—that feels good.

What keeps you motivated?

Money. These bills. (laughs) I would say my ultimate motivation is to make enough money to one day be able to take care of family and treat my loved ones to nice things. I’d also like to travel even more than I already do, and take my mom, step-mom, and grandmother on fully-paid vacations. Just being financially stable, having flexibility and multiple income streams. I don’t have to take care of anyone. No one in my life requires me to help them pay for things, but it’s something that I want to be able to do. 

How do you keep your head right, and your spirit together? 

Working out is huge for me. I work out every day. I always tell people that working out is my coffee. It really helps to get me ready for work. I also enjoy criminal justice shows. (laughs) I know that’s odd but when I need to relax I watch those shows because I know everything will be tied up and resolved in an hour. 

What else are you into? 

Traveling, learning about new cultures, meeting new people. I like to at least go to one new country per year. The last place I visited was the Bahamas, which was cool, but the last place I was really excited to go to was Zanzibar. That was my first trip to the African continent and it was my 30th birthday. The water was so beautiful. 

I have gained interest in stock trading and real estate, given my new career path. I’m really  seeking financial freedom, and I want to learn how to develop a stream of income without having to have a nine-to-five. I think that aspiration stems from being laid off before. I need to be able to have flexibility when it comes to work-life balance, but mostly I just don’t want to be reliant on a traditional job to be OK. 

I love volunteering. I work at food banks a lot, but I also like working toward the restoration of women. I previously volunteered with sex trafficked survivors, and my main passion is working with a segment of my friend’s nonprofit, Project Refuge, which focuses on ensuring that women in this rural area of Uganda have enough sanitary supplies to stay in school. My role is director of women’s protection and empowerment. For these girls, education will really help to change their lives and their economic situation, and I appreciate that doing something so small like access to sanitary products—which we take for granted—can really make a difference. 

What excites you most about your future?

The unknown. Just trying new things and figuring out what works. I’m working towards being able to volunteer while traveling abroad. So I’m setting myself up to not really have to be dependent on a nine-to-five office job and really just manage my time as I see fit, and do things I want to do.

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Kharmika Tillery Alston, Real Estate Broker and Entrepreneur

Hey, Kharmika! So in whatever terms feel best, can you describe what you do?

I’m a real estate broker. I help people buy, sell, and invest in real estate. I sell commercial and residential real estate, including land and leases. I’m also what I consider an aspiring social entrepreneur. I would like for the transactional nature of real estate to translate to real results for people, with a greater social impact. For example, there are people where nobody in their family has owned a house. A woman told me the story of how her grandmother lived in the same house for 35 years and it was considered the family house. When her grandmother passed away she was surprised to learn that her grandmother never owned the home. Or, take millennials, who have had a really tough time accumulating wealth. When the pandemic occurred, our generation  had barely recovered from the recession in 2008/2009, and have remained saddled with student loan debt, consumer debt, or even medical debt. So I’m building a business that supports those who are likely to experience anything from run-of-the-mill discrimination to redlining when buying a home. I work with anyone and everyone — first-generation property owners, millennials, Zoomers, and especially those from marginalized groups who have suffered because of the racial wealth gap. 

I can also share the reason I consider myself an aspiring social entrepreneur. I don’t want to sell real estate at a high level forever. I want to get to the point where the cash flow allows me to contribute to the community philanthropically. I want to disrupt the way nonprofits work in our community. You’ve seen organizations that have one Black person on staff who is of the community. Meanwhile, everyone else at that nonprofit has achieved real wealth and can afford to work for less competitive salaries, or they have a wealthy partner and don’t need to make a high wage at this nonprofit and take that pay cut. I want to disrupt that. I want to promote people from these communities and who are of these communities having a real say in the economic development of these communities. That’s a long-term goal. 

With those particular outcomes in mind, how do you tailor your approach or the way you run your business? How do you make sure you attract that diverse group of people you want to empower? 

I have a website called LiveLoveDurham.com, which is the main way I connect with folks. I’m thinking of overhauling it to focus less on real estate, and more lifestyle or community-oriented. If you look at the blog section, there is lots of curated content to educate people, but on the bio page I’m explicitly announcing my job and brokerage. I think I may take that out because many real estate agents avoid having real conversations around race, class, and ethnicity for fear of violating the Fair Housing Act. We aren’t supposed to discuss protected classes during the transaction. But conversations outside of the transaction on race and class are needed to  move the conversation forward. So I might take off that identifier so that I can discuss the things I want to discuss and how I want to discuss them. LiveLoveDurham.com also has a connected Instagram page, where I say I move past the transactional nature of real estate to have curated conversations and give my insights, not only as a Black woman living here, but also as a millennial. It’s real estate and community development from my vantage point. I also provide a lot of free and helpful content there through my Instagram TV videos. 

How did you arrive at this philosophy of service? 

I was living in Amsterdam, finishing the last leg of what I had intended to be my long-term federal government job. I wanted to start buying real estate, and was wondering where I should buy. I decided I wanted to buy somewhere in a community that I felt part of, and one that I could afford. So then I started looking at the market in Durham more closely, because I went to UNC Chapel Hill nearby for undergrad, and Duke for my master’s degree, and my husband was born and raised in Durham. It felt organic to come back here after living overseas for a few years. I would look at trends and saw there were a lot of articles like “best quality of life in the South,” or “best place for millennials” -- on and on, for entrepreneurship, for women. I thought, Woah, Durham is getting all of these accolades! 

We moved back stateside, to Durham, and I transitioned from my government job to working for a community bank — what they call a CDFI [community development financial institution]. A CDFI is a designation out of the Department of Treasury to essentially indicate that a particular bank serves the community better than, for example, Wells Fargo or Chase, and that’s based on a congressional act. Like you need to better serve the communities where you are physically located by providing valuable services such as mortgages, small business loans, etc. CDFIs began as an answer to that. So I did that for 15 months while I worked on getting my real estate license. What I learned is that Black people and Latinx people to a lesser degree really don’t benefit from all the affluent accolades the Triangle area has been receiving. There’s still really large wealth disparities. I thought, What can I do in my real estate vertical to improve these socioeconomic trends? That is where LiveLoveDurham.com came in, where I began highlighting POC-owned businesses, artists and creatives, and then also providing really distilled tips on real estate that anybody can just read and understand. There is so much information out there that isn’t helpful or is positioned as helpful but is actually intended to drive a profit. There’s so much misguidance. 

You’ve just named a few, but can you share some of the common obstacles people in marginalized communities face in terms of real estate opportunities? What are some of the experiences you’ve noted?

The racial wealth gap prevents people from having capital to invest. Because wealth is relative, there are people in real estate who don’t realize that putting twenty or thirty thousand down on a home is not within a lot of people’s capability. I had a client that inherited $160,000 from her aunt and used half of it to put down on her house. There are people who think that’s run-of-the-mill. Same at the CDFI where I worked after returning to the States. I worked with food businesses, and people would tell me about how they bootstrapped their way to building a business. Come to find out, their parents gave them a $10,000 loan to start the business. That’s a well-documented trend. The Pew Research Center says that friends and family invest $90 billion per year in their loved ones’ businesses. But that’s not the case for Black people. If anything, we have a significant capital gap. That impacts our ability to get a real estate loan, or to live in certain neighborhoods. Even some of the programs designed to close the racial wealth gap aren’t cutting it. The FHA has a product where you only have to put 3.5% down of the total purchase price. But you may only get qualified for $120,000. That’s not going to get much in Durham. Also, the racial wealth gap has a real, tangible impact on small business owners who want to buy or invest in real estate and thrive. 

I’d like to hear more about your background. You brought up your time in the State Department, and then you moved on to the CDFI. When you look back on all of these experiences, do you feel there’s some throughline that kind of pulled you to this point?

The throughline was seeking entrepreneurship, the ability to innovate, and to see results. When you work in government, your ideas, things like progress and improvement, results — those aren’t concepts in government. Government is all about the status quo — incrementalism, if that. I looked around and felt like, OK, everyone seems fine with relishing in mediocrity. I’m working three to four times harder than everyone else. So this presents an overworth on my part to this agency, but I can take these talents to where there isn’t a ceiling, and my hard work gets better results. I wanted to go somewhere I could be compensated monetarily and fulfilled. I wanted to get a return on those efforts emotionally, mentally, and financially. That’s what made me think, where can I go? 

Let me back up. I started in the State Department at 24 years old. At that time, I didn’t know all capitalist-driven workplaces thrive on the ideas of others without adequate compensation, specifically Black women. I didn’t know it wasn’t just the State Department. It’s everything. It’s everywhere. It wasn’t just at the community bank, or Wall Street banks. Just...period. Think about where our community would be if Black women just disinvested all their time and energy from white-led organizations, and put those efforts into their community? Our community would be leaps and bounds ahead of where we are now. 

Go off, Kharmika! 

It would be transformative, right? Once I had that epiphany, I had to move on. When you work for the government, you’re a representative for the government 24/7. Your opinions don’t matter. You just share whatever talking points they want you to share. That was very unsustainable for me once I felt like I was really seeing things clearly. And that dissatisfaction became especially resonant during what felt like rampant impunity and lack of concern for Black people being killed by police and during Trump’s presidency, specifically his first 100 days in office. In 2016, police killed more than 250 Black people and yet that remained unaddressed. There was so much gas-lighting and I had to participate in it. I’d reassure our Dutch counterpart that nothing has changed, everything is business as usual, we are hired to defend the Constitution, etc. I was regurgitating all of that but it’s like, who wrote the Constitution? I realized that I had all of these unchecked notions of patriotism, and I hadn’t examined these universal truths or beliefs. But they don’t apply to me and my rights, and they weren’t created with me in mind, so why am I defending this document? So as July 2017 approached and my tour in Amsterdam was set to end, I decided it was a good time to end my career with the State Department. 

We don’t get the acknowledgement or recognition we deserve as Black women. I think about how that journalist said he couldn’t focus on Representative Maxine Waters’ comments because of her “James Brown hair.” This is one of the longest-standing members of Congress. Or when [journalist] April Ryan was in a White House Press Corps briefing and shook her head as [former press secretary] Sean Spicer was speaking, and he condescendingly told her to stop. A few years later, an Asian-American journalist [Weijia Jiang] challenged the President when he directed her to ask China about the coronavirus. She was able to do that because April Ryan set the precedent for challenging authority in that space. Yet in this more recent incident, the journalist was praised and April Ryan, at the time, had to defend her actions. And so again I’m asking if acclaimed journalists and distinguished members of Congress can’t get recognized for their contributions, then what chance do I have? I can’t keep doing this for thirty, forty years. I had to break free. 

So looking ahead, what impact are you seeking to create with LiveLoveDurham.com, and what are your next steps toward that vision? 

There are certain financial and economic milestones I need to hit before I tell other people how to build their own wealth. I would like to sell real estate at a very high level, and then make sure that I’m always making space for those who wouldn’t ordinarily get a second look for certain properties. Even now, I try to put that into practice. I just got off the phone with a cosmetologist who was looking for commercial space, and had little idea about what is involved in that process. Many people would easily have hung up on her because it was clear that she was just starting out, and her understanding isn’t as sophisticated yet. But in helping her, my hope is that in five, six, seven years, she can support others and pay it forward. 

I also want to continue creating wealth for my family and myself, and learning how to create generational wealth. We need to know what it’s like working for ourselves at a high level, and a lot of Black women and men pour into these organizations we work for, with little to show for it in personal wealth. For example, think about how many Black women are teachers. Teachers in North Carolina get paid so little, despite giving so much to the community and to their students. And yet, the state doesn’t respect teachers which has a fairly large representation of Black women. I want to make sure we take care of ourselves, no matter the work we do or what background we’re coming from. So that’s the vision, empowering myself and my family, and creating generational wealth, while helping others do the same. 

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