Two dozen Boise realtors were getting ready for a trip to Texas when something called "Harvey" changed their plans. The massive hurricane forced thousands of evacuees into the Austin Convention Center where Keller Williams Realty was getting ready for their annual convention. It turned a revenue generating conference into a nonprofit disaster response campaign.
Chase Craig and the other Keller Williams agents disn't spend time talking about the housing market, about what's hot and what's not, they instead spent hours this week filling disaster relief buckets and distributing them to those who need them. Craig said it's all about now. "So these are kits that will be used for quick response for not just Harvey, Irma but for future storms. In fact they built five thousand of these buckets right here in this warehouse."
Once the buckets are full, they get loaded into trucks and the agents follow them to neighborhoods around Houston. Craig described what they saw. "You know the craziest thing is you drive down the street and it looks like nothing happened, and then you take a turn and every single house down the next street is a disaster zone. Just yesterday I spent time in West Houston and that time we spent mucking out a house we had to take out all the sheet rock out. They had six feet of water in the house for fourteen days."
On their way back to Austin, they had time to reflect on what this trip is really about. Craig says they will never forget. "You can just tell the way it impacted those people deep, they weren't ones to talk about real estate, they wanted to talk about the stories, the people they helped, you know everyone was upbeat."
All of the supplies are provided by a nonprofit created by Keller Williams Realty called, KW Cares.
