Brenda Hampton Higgins

I've been in this field since 1977 when I started working at an abstract company. That launched a career spanning over 25-30 years predominantly in the oil and gas industry. I worked in title research and as a field landman for many years, and I really enjoyed working with running title and determining property ownership, then identifying and locating the heirs to landowners and negotiating oil and gas leases with them. We took care of everything from identifying a piece of property, to running the title, to finding the owners, to negotiating, and then we took it from there through the point of when they got ready to drill the well. I even took care of any type of curative instruments and just made sure that everything was ready to go prior to them beginning drilling activities. When my mother needed more care, I got off the road and got an in-house position as a right-of-way agent for a public utility company, and I worked there for about 3 years. Then I changed positions within the company to my current role as a real estate agent. Today, I work directly with internal and external customers to identify the properties that they want to purchase. We also go out and look for properties to purchase for expansions of existing substations that our company currently has, and we basically oversee the portfolio of company-owned properties. My main area of expertise is people and negotiations - making things happen. It's kind of evolved from negotiating oil and gas leases to now negotiating property purchases.