Sitting in her usual Southern California traffic jam on her daily commute, Joy Lynn Moore decided she'd had enough. She'd made four visits in a year to Lexington to see her newborn niece and spend time with her brother and sister-in-law, she liked the area and her brother kept asking her to come to work for him, so less than two weeks later Moore was living in the Bluegrass.
Less than a half-dozen years later, Moore has climbed to the top of Fayette County realtors in sales so far in 2008 via specializing in helping people avoid commutes by living downtown.
Moore left her job as an office manager for a group of surgeons in San Diego to come work for her brother, Phil Holoubek, and his company. At first she filled in for employees on maternity leave and eventually became a licensed real estate agent and broker with the charge of selling the more than 100 condos between Lexington's Real Estate Company's (LRC) two downtown projects, the Nunn Building and Main and Rose.
"I never intended to work for my brother at all, so I just sort of morphed into it really," said Moore, 31, who met her husband and Main and Rose architect Andrew Moore in real estate classes after moving here.
"It's phenomenal. We're all very proud of each other and we're fortunate that we had the opportunity to work together. It just sort of happened, it wasn't planned that way." Moore said her husband's employer, EOP Architects, was actually selected for the job before Andrew Moore went to work for them.
While LRC's two recent projects have proven serendipitously to be a family affair, Moore has teamed with one of her best friends, Carrie Milner, another prolific downtown Realtor from a development family, the Lears, to get involved in the Lexington community and help improve the vitality of downtown.
"We actually refer clients to each other's projects a lot," said South Hill Group's Milner. "The projects themselves are different enough that they lend themselves to slightly different audiences, and truthfully we're both more focused on getting people to move downtown than getting people to move downtown into our project. We know that if downtown is successful, then we'll both be successful."
Both have proven to be successful in their field, though Milner has been a Lexingtonian her whole life and Moore has been in town for slightly more than five years.
"She's a newbie in a field that is just now being explored," Milner said. "The downtown market was almost totally untapped; there was nobody who was really in downtown Lexington, so she found that niche really, really early and she learned it and knows it as well as anyone who's lived here his or her entire life."
Moore has been excited about the changes she's seen in downtown since moving to Lexington and even since she and her husband moved to Mill Street three years ago.
"There's a whole culture down here that's really evolved even in the last five years since I've been here. I'd say really in the last two years now that more people are living downtown," she said. One shining bellwether, according to Moore, is the growth of the Downtown Lexington Corporation's Thursday Night Live, which she attends each week and recently sat at with her husband, brother, dog Pepper and her parents, who followed her to Lexington within six months of her move from Southern California.
"Most people are buying into the lifestyle, and I think that's the key. The lifestyle encompasses being able to walk everywhere. It's socially terrific, we can go out with our neighborhood friends any night of the week, we can call somebody up and say, 'Hey, let's walk down the street to Dudley's or Mellow Mushroom' or where ever we want to go.
"Just in the past year and a half or so there's so much more life on the street, and that's a huge shift from when I moved here," she said. But beyond enjoying what Lexington has to offer, Moore said she gets pleasure out of getting to be a part of advancing the community.
"Most people in San Diego are participants in their community rather than actually doing work and getting involved," said Moore, who was a part of introducing the Yellow Bikes program last year.
Moore also recently joined the Junior League and along with Milner will start this month managing the Bodley-Bullock House, a historic home and the Junior League's headquarters. In addition to doing a project with a friend, Moore is looking forward to being able to use the property management skills she and Milner learned from their jobs, as Moore also acts as a landlord for LRC's numerous rentals around the city.
As LRC's two downtown projects have been completed and only 14 of the units between the buildings are yet to be sold by the developer, Moore said she looks forward to helping in the planning stages of future LRC projects and possibly branching out into more independent real estate selling, which will mean more transformation in her style and comfort zone.
"I like to be completely behind the scenes, under the radar. Phil is always out there in the public, but I'm the behind-the-scenes person," she said.
But Milner has no doubt, as a friend and colleague, she can be successful selling more than family projects and outside of downtown.
"Were she to try to go in and just sell Chevy Chase (when she started), I think it might have been a little bit different, but I think that (downtown) is a market that really interested her and the area was really untapped. That's what really fed into her success, because she knows it inside and out, backwards and forwards, which most Realtors don't."
"She's made a name for herself without a doubt. She's the type of person that if she wants to do it, she'll figure out a way," Milner said.