You found the duck
Hi, I'm Theresa Raymond
Principal Broker and co-owner of TN Smoky Mtn Realty in Sevierville, Tennessee. New Yorker by birth, Smoky Mountain by choice. I help people buy, sell and actually make money on property in the Smokies.
A bit about me
I grew up in New York and moved south more than a dozen years ago. Before real estate I worked in payroll, including a stretch at a couple of Fortune 500 companies — not a glamorous background, but it taught me to read numbers carefully and never hand someone a figure I could not back up.
I came into real estate in 2012 as an office manager at a brokerage in Gatlinburg. I liked it immediately, and I set myself a goal of earning my broker's license within three years. I hit it. That license was the push I needed to go out on my own, and in 2017 my business partner Jake Cowart and I opened TN Smoky Mtn Realty.
Between us we have been part of hundreds of home, cabin and lot transactions across Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge and Sevierville. Most of my work is investment property — cabins that need to earn, not just look good in photos. I also co-host and manage short-term rentals, so when I tell a buyer what a cabin is likely to bring in, that comes from reading real booking calendars, cleaning invoices and shoulder-season dips, not from a spreadsheet someone handed me.
The part I enjoy most is explaining the nuts and bolts to people, so they know exactly what they are buying.
Let's talk
Call, text, or just send a photo of the duck.
No pressure and no drip campaign. If you just want to know what your place is worth, ask and I will tell you.
What I actually do
Buying and selling
Cabins that earn
Co-hosting and management
The market I work
Gatlinburg
Cabins and chalets up the mountain, minutes from the park entrances. This is where most of the short-term rental demand sits, and where the difference between a good buy and a bad one is widest.
Pigeon Forge
Parkway traffic, families, Dollywood. A different buyer and a different set of numbers from Gatlinburg, even though the two get talked about as if they were one market.
Sevierville
Where a lot of people actually live. Homes, land and quieter investment property, and the part of the county I get asked about least and recommend most.
Ask before you buy, not after
What can be rented short-term varies between cities and sometimes between streets. It is the single most expensive thing to get wrong here, and it is a five-minute conversation to get right.
Why people end up working with me
I own the outcome
As principal broker I am not passing you to a junior agent and checking in at closing. The buck stops here, which is exactly how I like it.
I run the kind of property I sell
I co-host and manage short-term rentals. The income numbers I quote come from calendars I actually look at.
I know what the rules are
Overlay districts, city limits, what can and cannot be rented short-term — getting this wrong costs buyers far more than a commission.
Hundreds of transactions behind us
In real estate since 2012, broker's license by 2015, and my own brokerage since 2017. Between Jake and me, hundreds of home, cabin and lot closings in this market.
I have served this board, not just sold in it
Secretary of the Board of Directors at the Great Smoky Mountains Association of REALTORS, several years on the MLS committee, and chair of the REALTOR trademark task force.
Six designations, earned not bought
GRI, ABR, SRS, PSA, RSPS and SFR. The ones that matter most here are Resort and Second-Home Property Specialist and Pricing Strategy Advisor, because that is exactly what this market is.
Keep the duck. Call me anyway.
Buying, selling, curious what your cabin could earn, or just want to say you found it — I answer my own phone.