For James Hutson, it all started with a 1994 green Thunderbird. And a personal desire to keep moving forward.
That T-bird was Hutson’s first car, and he bought it with money he earned from having yard sales.
Even then, as a teenager, Hutson was a salesman. He said he sold whatever he could get his hands on and put out on the yard on Carey Chapel Road. He had a goal: He had to buy a car.
He held yard sales all summer long back in 2004, and he figured out a way to extend his reach and get the word out about his yard sales. He called Tradio on WIZS.
Yep, Tradio.
“I sold so much on Tradio,” Hutson said.
“Without Tradio, I wouldn’t have gotten that first car as fast as I did,” he said.
When October rolled around, with his car – paid in full – in the front yard, the young man was on his way. Hutson celebrated his 16th birthday at his first job – Taco Bell.
Those yard sales – along with his positive, forward-thinking outlook – combined to propel Hutson into a career in real estate, which he landed on in a somewhat haphazard manner.
Now, as the owner of Henderson-based Ninja Realty and Boom Management, Hutson works with a team of highly skilled agents and real estate specialists to provide a full complement of services for their clients.
But when he was a student at Southern Vance High School, Hutson had plans of becoming a carpenter, a homebuilder.
That is, until he took carpentry class and learned that, as he put it, he wasn’t very good.
About that same time, his computer teacher gave the class an assignment to write about where they’d be after graduation, and, almost on a whim, Hutson said he decided he’d choose realtor.
He’d remembered a local realtor who’d helped a family member a few years earlier, Hutson said. So that’s the career he wrote about.
He and another student were in the running for a Teaching Fellows scholarship, but “I turned it down for real estate,” Hutson recalled. In hindsight, a good decision.
Fast-forward to Day 1 at real estate school. Hutson learned something in the first five minutes that had him all set to head for the door: Real estate, the instructor said, is commission-based.
What?
But there were no refunds, Hutson explained, somewhat philosophically adding, “we just keep moving forward, no refunds. Keep it moving.”
A single point kept him from passing the real estate exam on the first try. He needed an 80 and got a 79. It was close to a year before he could take the exam again, mostly because of the $500 fee he didn’t have.
But he used that time to lobby Vance-Granville Community College to add a real estate class, which it did. Hutson took the class, taught by former real estate appraiser Fern Boyd, and when he sat for the exam a second time, he “passed it with flying colors.”
Fast-forward again to 2015 when Ninja Realty began. Within a couple of years, he had taken the company independent and now, their bright orange signs are on homes for sale and for rent, as well as commercial properties.
Recently, a commercial property owner worked with Hutson’s consulting team for about 10 months to get the property ready for the market, and it’s currently under contract – for between $300,000 and $400,000 more than before the Ninja team got involved.
“I like seeing people reach their goals,” Hutson said. One of Ninja Realty’s core values is building generational wealth.
“I believe the best way to help a community is to help get it out of poverty,” he said. “Poverty is the enemy of everyone…if you create generational wealth and you change that system that people have been in for who knows how long – some people’s family has been in poverty for hundreds of years – you can really set a new course for people.”
There’s another core value, Hutson calls it Ninja’s “secret sauce” that he’s happy to share.
“We truly do try to treat everyone the way we want to be treated,” he said.
Landlords who work with Hutson’s team to manage their rental properties can rest assured that the Ninja team is going to treat their property as if it were their own. He employs the same negotiating style for clients as he would if he were buying a property for himself. “Everything I’m doing for me is what I do for the consumer,” he said.
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