At a general membership meeting Tuesday at the Owensboro Country Club, the Greater Owensboro Realtor Association (GORA) announced its Realtor of the Year, an award that has been taking place for nearly 40 years. Last year’s recipient, Angela Clark, presented the award to Tyler Shookman before a room full of real estate colleagues.
Shookman has been a realtor since 2013 and was the top producing agent in the L. Steve Castlen office the last four years, where he cultivated an online presence for the real estate company.
Along with serving on the Board of Directors for the Greater Owensboro Realtor Association and Aid the Homeless, he has raised nearly $30,000 through the Puzzle Pieces Lip Sync
Battle and the Boulware Mission’s “Dancing with the Stars,” both of which he took home People’s Choice Award. Shookman is set to serve as president of Aid the Homeless in 2020.
“I’m just getting started, so it’s quite an honor to be mentioned with all the other names in this room,” Shookman said in reference to previous Realtor of the Year winners. “It was a rough first year getting into real estate.”
Shookman said that a lot of people don’t understand what it means to build a career in real estate. In a tearful acceptance of the award, he described selling his car to make his mortgage payment the first year in the business.
“I never gave up,” Shookman said. “I kept working hard.”
