Allen Huggins '94

As a residential real estate agent for the past eight years, Allen Huggins ’94 has had to contend with uncertainty in the national economy, continually changing mortgage regulations, and the pressure of a full-commission job. But he wouldn’t want to be doing anything else. Working for BrokerSouth Real Estate Partners, Allen enjoys interacting with people, the problem-solving component of constructing deals, and most of all helping people reach their financial goals. He says, “It’s kind of cheesy, but I like making the American Dream happen for people.”

That Allen went into real estate was not a big surprise. Many members of his extended family are real estate, banking, and mortgage professionals. He recalls that in his youth, “All the family talks at Thanksgivings and Christmases usually revolved around real estate.”

He says Harding, too, helped prepare him for the work. In addition to providing a solid educational foundation, he says Harding nurtured key interpersonal skills: “How to deal with people; how to be a kind person, how to be a polite person, how to be a gentleman.”

A nine-year Harding student, Allen also enjoyed lessons learned in sports, mainly middle school cross country, basketball, and baseball. “We weren’t the biggest, we weren’t the fastest, we weren’t the strongest,” he says. “We had to work together as a team.”

After Harding, he graduated from Montgomery Bell Academy and then earned a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Georgia in 2002. By the spring of 2003 he had his license and was selling real estate. Just a few years later he was voted Best Real Estate Agent in Nashville Scene's 2006 Reader's Poll.

Although he necessarily devotes a lot of time to work, he spends as much time as he can with his family. He and wife Maggie have a new son, Emory, born in January.

Allen also makes time to volunteer on Harding’s Alumni Board. As a student, he never realized how much the financial contributions and volunteer efforts of alumni affected the quality of his education. Now he sees that he can do for today’s students what other alums did for him. “This is my opportunity to give back to the students who are there now, to give them the experience that I had,” he states. “Had I not gone nine years at Harding, I definitely would not be who I am today.”