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FRONT LINES: Power of One Christine Ricketts
At this time of strained ties between countries, ithardly seems worth noting when another U.S. home sale closes smoothly and with smiles all around. Yet such events are the small but irreplaceable bridges that Christine Ricketts, a sales associate with Long & Foster Real Estate in Old Town Alexandria, Va., helps build. Ricketts is a naturalized American, born in Ireland and educated in London. She’s also a fluent speaker of Farsi, who lived in Tehran during the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. She generates about 15 percent of her business from her international contacts, mainly among families from the Middle East who are building new lives in this country. Ricketts’ interest in other cultures and her language skills (she also speaks Dari, an Afghan dialect of Farsi, and Kurdish) led her two years ago to explore volunteering with the United Nations. She couldn’t reconcile the time commitment with work and family issues, but Ricketts continues to do her bit to address global issues—even if it just means a job well done at the closing table. “Being able to build trust when people buy a home shows that you can bridge differences among cultures,” she says. Certainly, there’s never been a better time for that. |
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