Stacey Johnson-Cosby, a broker at ReeceNichols REALTORS®, a Berkshire Hathaway Company, is a fighter for private property rights. She works to stand up for and support the small to medium landlords across the country who are providing housing for the mass of renters seen in recent years. Her impressive work is the reason she was named as a Crusader in our 2024 class of Newsmakers.
In this exclusive interview, as part of our Newsmaker Spotlight series, Johnson-Cosby discusses what the landscape of private property rights looks like now and in the future, and how others in the industry can join her work to preserve the balance in the relationship and rights between landlords and tenants.
Claudia Larsen: Tell me a bit about your background in real estate and your journey to where you are now.
Stacey Johnson-Cosby: So I have a twin sister—Tracy, The Safety Lady. When we were in college, she had an idea to get her real estate license. Being my older sister, by 13 minutes, I followed her and I got my license. It is literally that simple—I followed my twin sister into the business. That was like 35, 36 years ago.
CL: In your work fighting for private property rights, you were named the incoming vice chair of the NAR Property Management Forum. Can you tell me more about what that role looks like, and the work you’ve been doing for private property rights?
SJC: What I’m looking forward to in that forum is giving a voice to residential housing providers in the rental market. That’s a very big part of our industry, those who provide rental housing, those investors. I’m also on the commercial committee and I am lucky enough to be able to attend other committee meetings where I get to share my concerns and suggestions around our quickly changing rental market.
I just came back from another real estate association talking about this very issue—private property rights— about some of the threats that we’re seeing on the horizon. We need to be made aware of them because socialism in housing is very real. It’s happening and by large, our real estate associations are not listening and not properly reacting. I feel like that’s my role is to say, “Hey, over here, this is really happening. It sounds very unbelievable, but it’s true.” Many of my peers are not aware of it, and our real estate associations are not either. They’re not being as proactive as they could and should be. And that is the role I cut out for myself—somebody has to do it. I want my peers to be aware so they can watch for it. More importantly, what are we going to do about it? That’s something else I’m working on too. How do we fight against these? We need to watch this stuff. We need to get engaged and we need to fight back, because our next fight takes it to the state level where we’re asking the state to keep this from happening.
CL: You’ve said that you “firmly believe that our private property rights are the cornerstone of the American Dream.” Could you expand a little more on this?
SJC: There’s socialism in housing now, and that’s something that’s new and more pronounced in the last few years than I’ve ever seen before. It’s all around rental properties. There’s a rise in importance for rentals as of late. There are a lot of landlords who own investment properties, and a lot that use it as a retirement strategy. You have your investment, your rental home, and when you retire, you’ll get a little income from that. You’ll also have a portfolio that you can build up and pass to the next generation. It’s very important not only to my peers, but to people who are looking to retire and use real estate as an investment tool.
We’re fighting laws that we’ve never seen before, and I think overall those laws impact property ownership in general because socialists don’t believe in property rights. Because they don’t believe in property rights, it’s a nightmare to fight against that. But they have the ear of a lot of elected officials. As a matter of fact, a lot of them are elected officials. Our goal is to create an environment where people who work hard can buy their homes or investment properties, and that helps to realize the American dream.
CL: You’ve done a lot of work with education, with your local city council housing-industry candidate forum, your three Jackson County tax appeal workshops and your Legislative & Community Town Hall. What effect do you think educating home/property owners has on the housing market—the benefits and such?
SJC: I think it’s great and necessary. Education is very important to me.
First and foremost, we are protectors of private property rights for all, including our past and future clients. So I think we have the responsibility of educating and protecting them in our roles as REALTORS®. The tax workshop that we did, we helped over 3,500 property owners learn how to appeal their taxes to not lose money on their homes. That’s why education is important. We share with these property owners “here’s what the law says and here’s how to protect yourself.” That protects homeowners directly.
Also, during the pandemic, we did three or four workshops on rental assistance. I looked around and no one else was talking about how to access those millions of dollars of rental assistance that we were hearing about. So I did a workshop, and we advertised it to REALTORS®, housing providers and to renters. Here’s where the money is and here’s how to access it. Because of that, we prevented a lot of evictions because tenants were able to pay their rent, and we kept a lot of housing providers with the ability to hold onto their properties.
We also did, like you mentioned, the candidate forum hosted by those of us in the housing industry. We need to know who’s running for office. Our goal is to identify who we can support, who supports us, and to let them know we’re out here and talk to them about the issues and our ideas.
Events and education just come natural to me, and I’d rather have too much information out than not enough
CL: Speaking of education, how important do you feel it is for brokers and agents to work to educate their local communities?
SJC: Very. We have to know what’s going on because you’ll wake up one day and you won’t be able to do what you want with your property. It’s important for my peers, brokers and my fellow agents to know about these things and to fight against them. I think it’s very important for us to be the voice for our clients—current, past and future. We are the voice of protecting private property rights for homeowners. That’s very critical.
That also means getting into the media. Somebody has to shake the tree and say “Wake up, look at this. We’ve got to fix it.” My goal is that we get organized and speak up.
CL: Tell me about your mission with your growing organization, The National Housing Provider Coalition.
SJC: We’re working on building it, it’s a grassroots group. Our goal is to be the voice for the small to medium housing provider in the country. Part of building that is to create alliances with other organizations like NAR to help support us because our voices are not formally anywhere until our group came along. We need our real estate associations to work hand in hand with us on this emerging issue. This is something new and I know sometimes organizations take a long time to come around, but we can’t afford the delay. I need my real estate associations to step up and address this.
Part of it means getting into the media, like I mentioned before, and letting people see that we’re there. There is someone representing the voice of the small housing provider, because our needs and the way we run our business is different from some of the big organizations. The majority of landlords in the country are mom and pop with less than nine units. We create the majority of housing in our country, and yet we don’t have a formal voice anywhere. We must represent our voice like the tenants are doing.
The elected officials are listening to these people who’ve not created a single unit of housing. This can’t be sustainable. We’ve got to change it. Somebody has to disrupt and change it.
CL: What does it mean to you to be named as one of RISMedia’s 2024 Real Estate Newsmakers?
SJC: It’s exciting, and I’m appreciative of RISMedia for identifying me in this role because it’s exciting that our voices are heard in some corners. We need to expand on that locally. When we were in the pandemic, the tenant groups were in the media all over the place. So we had a strategy and I reached out to reporters, and as a result, I was in the media locally. I was able to raise our voices through me, through the media. If it’s not me, then I’m pointing them to someone else to get our voices out there to counter the stories that we’re hearing.
I think through this particular acknowledgement, it furthers our voice and it gives me a chance to talk about preserving and fighting for private property rights. It shines a light in a place I wouldn’t normally have. And so for that, I’m excited and I’m appreciative. Things are different, it’s not like the old days. We have to use every tool available to us, and you all (the media) are a very important part of informing our industry.
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