Shabana Pathan, a Lehigh Valley Realtor helping people buy and sell residential, commercial and investment properties, began her professional career in a very different setting: practicing law in the Supreme Court of India.
“I would never, ever, in my weirdest dreams think of becoming a Realtor,” she said. “I did not know anything about real estate.”
Law was a passion for Pathan, a third-generation lawyer who grew up mesmerized by her father’s legal library. In the 1990s, she worked at a law firm that recovered funds for the State Bank of India, the Industrial Development Bank of India and several other financial institutions.
However, everything changed after her father died. Pathan moved to Dallas, where she had family around 2000, where she pursued a paralegal certification and found a job as a database administrator.
She moved to New Jersey after getting married but she and her husband met with friends for dinner in the Lehigh Valley and signed a contract for a home here very soon after. She said she wanted to live somewhere that was beautiful with nicer homes.
She took up real estate at the suggestion of her father-in-law, a real estate investor in New Jersey.
“I’m always a hustler, always working hard,” Pathan said.
She eventually landed in the Lehigh Valley, where she now leads a group under Keller Williams Real Estate. The group has a 4.9-star rating on Google and Zillow, and recently announced an expansion into New Jersey.
It is a competitive local real estate market. Three Lehigh Valley townships were among Pennsylvania’s fastest-growing communities, according to the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp. The Greater Lehigh Valley Realtors reported a record median home price of $385,000 in June.
Pathan said she finds success in real estate work using core skills of lawyering like negotiating, delegating work and understanding contracts.
Shawn Morrow, operating principal at Keystone Partners Group/Keller Williams Real Estate, said Pathan is “very diligent and very detailed when it comes to running her real estate transactions” and staying on top of changes in the industry. He added that she “has always given back.”
“Shabana is always willing to be on a panel and share with any agent, whether they’re on her team or not, what she’s doing to be successful,” Morrow said.
But it was not a smooth transition from analyzing and drafting legal documents to real estate transactions for Pathan. She was issued her Pennsylvania real estate license in 2008, as the financial crisis devastated the industry.
“Why did I join this? It’s so hard to get clients, it’s so hard to go out and show homes, it’s so hard to work in this business,” she recalled thinking.
One of the biggest challenges was building a clientele without knowing many people in the area, she said.
“I’m brown, and I don’t really speak the language and I have an accent,” Pathan said. “All of these were very big hurdles for me and was same for my team members.”
But she found the community to be welcoming. Today, most of her business comes from referrals.
Pathan attributed her success to hard work and her team. One of her first hires over a decade ago was agent Saman Chaudhry, who moved to the Lehigh Valley after practicing real estate in Georgia.
“We were in a rental place and were driving rundown cars,” Chaudhry said.
Chaudhry didn’t want to do real estate anymore when she moved here.
“After meeting with her, my life changed,” Chaudhry said.
The Shabana Pathan Group’s priority is helping others, according to Chaudhry. Pathan uses this mindset in her personal life, donating to various local and international charities. One day, she hopes to build a hospital in her father’s name in India.
“From childhood, I learned that giving is the most beautiful thing, and if you are capable of it, you must share it with others,” she said.
Pathan believes that she is good at anything she sets her mind to because “I’m very hardworking, and I’m honest and I do things by heart.”
“I’m a good mom, I’m a good wife, I’m a good homemaker,” she said. “I was a very good lawyer, even though it was just very short-lived career, and I became a really good Realtor.”
Isabella Gaglione is a freelance writer.
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