Emily Askin

As a full time, full service real estate agent in Pittsburgh, I came to real estate the long way: theater school, two decades of improv comedy, a salon I built from the studs, and a running list of renovation projects with my husband. Every one of those taught me something I use weekly, like how to read a room, and how to tell good construction from a fresh coat of paint.

"The details are not the details. They make the design." - Charles Eames

I trained as an actor in the Kenyon College Theater Department and studied improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York, then spent twenty years performing and teaching with the best in the business, in New York, in LA, and here at home with Steel City Improv and Arcade Comedy Theater. People ask what improv has to do with real estate. Honestly, almost everything. Improv teaches you to listen harder than you talk, and to stay calm when the scene changes underneath you. That is a Tuesday in this business. An inspection surprises you, an appraisal comes in low, a competing offer lands at 9pm, the seller develops feelings about the dining room chandelier. I do not rattle, and my clients feel that. 

I moved back to Pittsburgh from New York in 2011 and co-founded Tula Organic Salon and Spa, named Pittsburgh's Best Salon in its first year. I'm also Aveda trained, which surprises no one who has watched me react to good lighting. Building out that salon, and renovating investment properties with my husband in the years since, gave me a working education in craftsmanship and solid engineering, and a healthy respect for what it costs to do construction right. Pittsburgh is lucky in its housing stock. We have architecture other cities would kill for, and I care deeply about preserving Pittsburgh's historic homes and keeping them livable. Housing quality is not an abstraction to me. I have opened the walls.

I think of my job as connecting things. People to houses, obviously, but also people to each other, to the contractors, lenders, inspectors, and designers I trust, and to neighborhoods they did not know to look at. I love this city without qualification and I know it block by block, from Highland Park and Garfield to Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, and Point Breeze. My work as a Pittsburgh real estate agent does not end at the closing table either. I advise on all of it, before, during, and long after you have bought or sold, because the house keeps being a house after the paperwork is done.

So here is what working with me looks like. If you are buying, I will tell you the truth about a house, including the parts that cost money. If you are selling, I will price it with evidence and market it like I mean it. In a negotiation, I work the problem from angles nobody planned for, because someone spent twenty years training me to do exactly that on a stage with no script. Either way, you get a person who thinks on her feet and picks up the phone, and who will still answer your questions about gutters three years from now.