REALTOR® Hometown Hero

BY LESLIE CUMMINGS

Trail blazer

Back in the nascent years of the Fair Housing Act, Mary Hudson Glazer, CRS®, put the law to work, showing minority buyers properties in neighborhoods the buyers weren’t always welcome in.

“Sometimes on showings we’d be harassed by neighbors yelling racial slurs,” she says. “But I knew we had the law behind us, so we put one foot in front of the other.”

She’s continued to set an example over the past 30 years, teaching practitioners and potential homebuyers about fair housing issues.

For her years of hard work and dedication to the issue, she’s been named a Hometown Hero by NAR President Cathy Whatley.

Hudson Glazer is the fair housing officer and director of multicultural services for Realty One in Cleveland, part of Ohio powerhouse Real Living Inc. In those two roles, Hudson Glazer focuses on education. She teaches the basics of fair housing to first-time buyers at churches and community centers. Back in the office, she teaches a multicultural sensitivity class to help Realty One associates feel comfortable working with people of various racial and cultural backgrounds.

Most recently, she organized sign-language classes for Realty One practitioners. “It’s another way for us to give equal access to all people,” she says. The fair housing law was expanded in 1988 to include protections for families and people with disabilities, including the hearing-impaired.

When she’s not focused on fair housing and diversity education, she’s recruiting salespeople from diverse backgrounds and training managers at her company’s other offices to do the same. With salespeople and staff who collectively speak 38 languages, Realty One and Real Living are poised as true multicultural providers—something Hudson Glazer could only have dreamed of during those tenuous early days of fair housing.

Dossier: Mary Hudson Glazer, CRS®

Realty One Inc., Cleveland