MAY 2020
VOLUME 25 • ISSUE 1
Capturing REAL Moments in Real Estate since 1995
RealtyLine: 25 Years Later FACEBOOK @myrealtyline TWITTER @RealtyLineATX
This Is A Story About Us written by RIKI MARKOWITZ
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RealtyLine publishers and owners, Doren Carver and Tawanna Verock, remember May 11, 1995 like it was yesterday. The inaugural issue of RealtyLine had just finished its printing run in the still, dark hours of the morning. It was now up to the U. S. Postal Service to deliver 3,500 copies to real estate professionals all over Austin. The partners in business and in life weren’t experiencing delusions of grandeur by any means. Doren and Tawanna knew that it would take more than a single 20-page broadsheet to make any kind of impact on the audience. But it was the first step in the plan. Twenty-five years later, RealtyLine is as much a part of the fabric of Austin’s real estate community as any real estate agency or lender.
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The story behind RealtyLine started a few years before that May day. In 1994, a 26-year-old Doren was considering what he wanted to do with his life. One idea was to publish a newspaper. It wasn’t just a youthful pipe dream. His paternal grandfather owned a printing company in Canton, Ohio and relatives on his maternal grandfather’s side owned and worked at the daily newspaper in Medina, New York. Tawanna, Doren’s girlfriend at the time, was employed by a company that started a desktop publishing department. At 20 years old and learning about publishing and mass communications, Tawanna would soon be considering her own career prospects. The newspaper business was a good fit for both. Doren and Tawanna just had to decide which industry to build a publication around.
It’s no surprise to anyone who knows Doren that he and Tawanna landed on real estate. At the time, recalls Doren, there was a publication for everything. “But we saw an opening in real estate,” he says. It was much more than a hunch. Doren also had family members who worked in the real estate industry. His father owned a mortgage company in the 1970s. So one could say that launching RealtyLine marked the culmination of his relatives’ life’s work and ambitions. “The idea,” says Doren, “was to bring together all corners of the real estate transaction into one space, including REALTORS, loan officers, title agents and builders.” The couple also opted to base the publication in Austin, even though they were living and working in San Antonio. They weren’t interested in moving to the capital city just yet (“Austin was too expensive. Even back then!” says Tawanna). But when it came to prospects and making connections, Austin had a lot of advantages. Not to mention, Tawanna was born and raised in Austin so she was familiar with the city. And while Doren knew regional managers at real estate companies and mortgage officers and builders in San Antonio, even those connections suggested that the Austin market was rebounding faster than expected from the previous decade’s statewide recession. Doren predicted that real estate professionals in Austin were sorely in need of a unifying trade publication. Together, Doren and Tawanna came up with the company name, Caxton Publications. Partly, it derived from Caxton Press, the printing company owned by Doren’s grandfather. William Caxton was also the name of a famous 15th century English printer and author. He started the first [25 Years Later contines on page 12]