John L. Scott’s VP of Franchise Development & Operations Howard Chung recently sat down with brokers Tom Minty of our Bellevue Issaquah office, and Barry Long of Sotheby’s International Realty, for a conversation about accessible housing and real estate.
With 20+ years of experience as a John L. Scott broker, Tom Minty was inspired to focus on accessible housing by a family friend’s experience searching for a home as a person with deteriorating physicality due to Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Her challenges drove Tom to start researching accessible housing and led him to realize there was little information on the topic and few resources for buyers and sellers. Tom founded Able Environments in 2004 to focus on the need for providing resources and education on the issues of accessible living and housing needs for aging populations.
Barry Long’s path towards real estate and accessible housing was a quite different one to Tom’s. A motorcycle accident in the early 1990s resulted in him being confined to a wheelchair and led to a career in motivational speaking. In a discussion after a presentation at Sotheby’s, he mentioned the roadblocks to finding accessible housing and was encouraged to become a realtor himself. Barry joined forces with Tom in 2017 and they have been working together ever since to bring awareness about the need for accessible housing to a wider audience and to facilitate the legislative changes needed to make accessibility a priority.
An inspiring team, Tom and Barry are passionate about improving homeownership opportunities for people of all abilities now and in the future!
Watch the full podcast here.
