I'm JUST Tanisha Holmes

Artist • Artisan • Realtor • Builder • Creator

For more than 25 years, Tanisha Holmes has built a career around something she has always loved—HOME. From helping people purchase their first home to building new spaces, creating handcrafted soaps and candles, developing fragrances, and producing original art, Tanisha's businesses may look different, but they are connected by one creative vision:

Find It. Build It. Experience It. Create It.

Tanisha has also brought her real estate experience to television through an appearance on HGTV's House Hunters. During the production experience, her own home was used as a filming and studio location, bringing together her longtime career in real estate, her love of homes and design, and the television production experience associated with HGTV, House Hunters, and Warner Bros. Discovery. It became another chapter in a journey centered around homes, people, creativity, and storytelling.

Homes-By-Holmes Real Estate — Find It.

Real estate is where much of Tanisha's professional journey began. Through Homes-By-Holmes Real Estate, she helps buyers and sellers navigate the real estate process, with a special passion for first-time homebuyers and people facing more complicated financial circumstances.

Her experience includes successfully helping buyers purchase homes while in an active Chapter 13 bankruptcy. These transactions can involve strict lending requirements, additional documentation, bankruptcy guidelines, and court or trustee approval processes. Every situation is different and approval is never guaranteed, but Tanisha believes buyers should understand their options before assuming homeownership is out of reach.

She also helps buyers explore available down-payment and closing-cost assistance programs, which may include grants and forgivable, deferred-payment, or repayable assistance depending upon eligibility, funding availability, lender requirements, and individual program guidelines.

Her philosophy is simple:

Understand the requirements. Explore the options. Create a plan. Find out what may be possible.

For Tanisha, real estate has never been only about selling a house. It's about helping people find a pathway to homeownership.

She Builds Holmes — Build It.

After decades of helping people buy and sell homes, Tanisha expanded her passion into construction—trading part of her real estate hat for a construction hard hat.

Through She Builds Holmes, she combines her real estate experience with construction, creativity, and design. Her work includes new construction, custom homes, renovations, additions, ADUs, tiny homes, multifamily projects, and other creative housing solutions.

Tanisha believes there is more than one way to create a place called home. Her mission is rooted in a simple belief:

Homeownership should be obtainable for more people.

Soap Opera Soapz + Opera Wicks — Experience It.

Finding or building the house is only part of the journey. The next step is creating the feeling of home.

Through Soap Opera Soapz and Opera Wicks, Tanisha brings her artisan creativity into everyday living through handcrafted soaps, soy candles, specialty fragrances, and custom creations.

Her growing fragrance collection includes perfumes, colognes, body fragrances, and home and room sprays. From fresh and floral fragrances to warm woods, patchouli, sophisticated masculine scents, and luxurious fragrance profiles, each creation is another opportunity to express personality through scent.

Soap for the body.
Perfume & Cologne for you.
Candles & Home Sprays for your space.

For Tanisha, fragrance is another form of art. A scent can remind you of a person, bring back a memory, change the atmosphere of a room, or become part of what makes a house feel like home.

Tanisha Holmes Art + Custom Creations — Create It.

Creativity has been part of Tanisha's life since childhood. Through Tanisha Holmes Art + Custom Creations, she continues to explore color, texture, design, imagination, and personal expression.

For Tanisha, art doesn't have to exist only on a traditional canvas. Creativity can be found in the design of a room, the construction of a home, the colors of handcrafted soap, the fragrance of a candle, or an original piece of artwork.

Guided by Experience, Sisterhood & Faith

Tanisha is also quick to acknowledge that she did not make this journey alone.

An important influence throughout her real estate career has been Dee H. Best, a mentor, colleague, friend, and sister with more than 50 years of real estate experience.

Dee began her real estate journey in the Georgia market, working during an era when assumable mortgages, including Fannie Mae assumable financing, were part of many real estate transactions. Her experience grew to include REO and distressed properties, investment properties, and working with real estate investors.

Together, Tanisha and Dee have worked through challenging transactions and with investors and hard-money lenders, drawing upon decades of combined real estate knowledge and problem-solving experience.

But their connection reaches far beyond business.

Tanisha and Dee also share the bond of sisterhood through SWING PHI SWING Social Fellowship, Incorporated®. Their relationship represents mentorship, friendship, sisterhood, perseverance, shared knowledge, and the importance of learning from those who walked the road before you.

And through every chapter of the journey, Tanisha remains grounded in her faith.

God has been so good to both of us.

Through changing real estate markets, challenging transactions, construction, entrepreneurship, television, art, and new opportunities, Tanisha remains grateful for the people God has placed along her path and for every opportunity to learn, create, build, and help someone else along the way.

One Woman. One Vision. Many Creations.

Sometimes Tanisha's canvas is a house.

Sometimes it's a construction plan.

Sometimes it's a real estate transaction that others thought couldn't be done.

Sometimes it's a bar of handcrafted soap, a candle, perfume, cologne, or home fragrance.

And sometimes it really is a canvas.

The canvas changes. The creativity doesn't.

Find It. Build It. Experience It. Create It.

Homes-By-Holmes Real Estate — Find It.
She Builds Holmes — Build It.
Soap Opera Soapz + Opera Wicks — Experience It.
Tanisha Holmes Art + Custom Creations — Create It.

Tanisha Holmes

Artist • Artisan • Realtor • Builder • Creator

As Seen on HGTV's House Hunters

One Vision. Many Creations. All Things Home.

Young, Female: Breaking Barriers in Real Estate

Young Female: Building My Own Table

My journey in real estate began at a young age, and I learned early that sometimes you have to be willing to create your own opportunities—even when people think you're moving too fast.

In my early twenties, I took a major step and opened my own real estate firm. At the time, I was among a relatively small number of Black and minority real estate professionals in my area who owned and operated their own firms, and I was certainly one of the youngest.

I still remember an agent who worked with me saying something that has stayed with me all these years:

“You are bold and brave for stepping out there like this at such a young age.”

She understood the significance of what I was doing. Many of the women who looked like me and had established their own businesses had already spent a decade or more building their careers before taking that step.

My path was different.

I had been selling real estate for less than two years when I decided to step out and establish my own firm.

And things moved fast.

During my first year in real estate, I sold nearly 88 homes—an extraordinary accomplishment, especially for someone just beginning her career. I was young, learning the business, building relationships, selling homes, and establishing my name all at once.

I even had my own subdivision in Holly Springs, North Carolina, another opportunity that was unusual for someone with my age and level of experience at the time.

And there was another part of the story that cannot be ignored: I was a young Black woman.

I didn't necessarily look like what some people expected a real estate firm owner, entrepreneur, or person in a leadership position to look like at that time. My age, my gender, and the color of my skin were all part of the reality of stepping into rooms and opportunities where people like me were not always widely represented.

But I kept walking into those rooms.

I remember one of the directors within the real estate organization talking to me about what I had accomplished. It felt like a compliment, but at the same time, I could tell there was genuine curiosity.

It was almost as if the question was:

“How did this young woman get here this quickly?”

I understood the curiosity. I was young. I hadn't been in the business very long. Yet I had already sold a significant number of homes, was involved with a subdivision, and had stepped out to establish my own real estate firm.

That moment stayed with me because sometimes people can be impressed by you and still be trying to figure you out at the same time.

Looking back, I don't think I fully understood how bold some of those moves were. I wasn't thinking about making history or breaking barriers.

I was working. I was building. I was creating something of my own.

Opening a firm in my early twenties wasn't simply about putting my name on a company. I had to learn how to lead, make difficult decisions, manage transactions, serve clients, build relationships, solve problems, and establish myself in an industry where I did not always see many people who looked like me in ownership and leadership positions.

And Now I'm the General Contractor

More than 25 years later, some of those assumptions still make for a few interesting—and sometimes funny—moments.

Today, in addition to real estate, I am a licensed general contractor.

There have been times when I've walked onto one of my construction sites and someone assumed I was the lady from the bank, the real estate agent, or maybe one of the property owners.

I sometimes have to smile and say:

“No. I'm the general contractor on this site.”

Those are my little “Ha-Ha Moments.”

Sometimes I actually enjoy them because I get to watch the expression change when people realize that the woman standing in front of them isn't visiting the construction site.

She's running it.

I don't always fit the picture some people have in their minds of what a general contractor is supposed to look like—and I'm perfectly fine with that.

More than 25 years ago, I was the young Black woman people didn't necessarily expect to own the real estate firm.

Today, sometimes I'm the woman they don't expect to be the general contractor.

Different industry. Different job site. Same woman building her own table.

More Than 25 Years Later...

Now I can look back at that young Black woman in her twenties and see just how far she has come.

The young woman who stepped out on faith, opened her own real estate firm, sold nearly 88 homes in her first year, and took on opportunities that were unusual for someone her age and experience level could never have imagined all the places this journey would eventually take her.

Today, I am a longtime real estate broker, firm owner, licensed general contractor, entrepreneur, creator, and television-featured real estate professional, with the opportunity to share part of my real estate journey with a national television audience through HGTV's House Hunters.

But I want people to understand something important:

Television wasn't the beginning of my story.

It was another chapter in a story that began more than 25 years ago, when a very young Brown woman decided she wasn't going to wait until somebody else thought she was ready.

I am still building.

Still learning.

Still creating opportunities.

Still opening doors.

And hopefully, still showing another young woman coming behind me that she doesn't have to wait for permission either.

Because sometimes you aren't given a seat at the table.

Sometimes you have to build your own table—and once you build it, make room for somebody else to sit beside you.

— Tanisha Holmes

Through It All, I Choose Joy

Tanisha Holmes’ journey has included successes, unexpected turns, disappointments, betrayals, setbacks, lessons, and new beginnings. Yet through every season, she has continued to approach life with faith, gratitude, creativity, and joy. She believes difficult seasons do not have to define the rest of the journey; they can strengthen you, redirect you, and prepare you for something greater.

For Tanisha, the roller coaster represents life itself—the climbs, drops, curves, and moments when you cannot see what is waiting around the next turn. But through it all, her faith in God has remained her foundation. I choose Joy!