By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher
LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — Penny Bowen had a vision for what she wanted her brokerage to feel like before she had a single listing to hang in the window. She wanted it on the Lynchburg Square. She wanted people walking down the sidewalk to wave. She wanted it to be, in her words, “a place where everybody knows your name.”
Bowen Signature Properties opened its doors in a storefront on the square earlier this year, the realization of a dream had been building toward for more than 16 years in real estate. In June 2022, she earned her broker’s license specifically so that when the opportunity arrived, she’d be ready.
“Now was my chance,” she said.
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From Hartselle to Riddle Road
Penny is originally from Hartselle, Alabama, and moved to Tullahoma in 2003. She and her husband Jeff — a custom home builder who has been in the trade for 40 years and whose work includes homes built for several well-known Moore County families — have been together a decade and married eight years this May. Together they have a blended family of seven children and five grandchildren.
The couple moved to Moore County about nine years ago, settling on Riddle Road just off Highway 55 near Dillingham Hill. They owned property in the county before that, and recently purchased another parcel on Preston Ridge, where Jeff plans to build a home for one of their daughters. The long game, Penny says, is to eventually build there themselves.
She’d had a passion for real estate since Alabama but held off until her children were old enough. She got her license after moving to Tennessee, took a three-year medical leave at one point, and has been back and building ever since. The broker’s license in 2022 was the piece she needed to go out on her own.
Being a realtor married to a custom builder is, as Bowen acknowledges with a smile, something of a power couple arrangement. She handles the transactions; he builds the homes. Together, they both own Bowen Signature Properties.
“It’s personal and professional,” she said.
First-Time Buyers and the Long View
Ask Penny what she specializes in, and she answers without hesitation: first-time home buyers. She loves guiding people through the excitement and the anxiety of their first purchase, connecting them with lenders she trusts, walking them through the process from financing to closing.
“I love helping them to their first step in their journey,” she said.
She’s also candid about what the job actually requires. Real estate agents, she says, end up playing a lot of roles that aren’t listed in the job description — grief counselor for families going through a loss, sounding board for couples navigating a divorce, therapist for buyers who are in the grip of one of the largest decisions of their lives.
“We hear everybody’s troubles,” she said. “We keep everything confidential. We just have to listen.”
Her 16-plus years in the business have also given her something harder to teach: market perspective. She was working through the 2007 crash and the 2020 boom, and she’s seen the full range of what a market can do. That experience, she says, is part of what she brings to buyers and sellers who are trying to make smart decisions in uncertain conditions.
For now, she’s watching the spring market come to life. After a quiet winter, activity is picking up — calls coming in again, listings preparing to come to market, buyers who had been waiting for warmer weather starting to move.
“We have buyers coming out of hibernation,” she said, “and this beautiful weather — the phone is picking back up.”
Rooted in Community
The Bowens’ brokerage tagline is “rooted in community,” and she takes that seriously in the most literal sense: she lives here, works here, and has been planting roots in Moore County for years before the brokerage sign went up.
Bowen Signature Properties also tries to put their money where their mouth’s are. They sponsors two youth softball teams — one under Bowen Signature Properties and a second under Jeff Bowen Home Builders. The brokerage also has signage at the Diamond Club at the Moore County High School baseball field. Penny says she wants the business to do more in the community as it grows, including events and local partnerships.
Having a brick-and-mortar on the square, she says, wasn’t a marketing calculation. It was a values statement.
“I want people to feel like they can stop by, have a conversation, or just wave hello,” she said. “I hope our presence helps add to the energy and life of the square.”
Five years from now, she hopes Bowen Signature Properties looks less like a new business and more like a fixture — a team of agents, a deeper presence in local life, and a track record of helping families find their footing in Moore County. But the ambition, she says, isn’t about scale for its own sake.
“Helping people — that’s what I love,” she said. “Anything I can do to help somebody, that’s what I am doing, no matter what it is they need.” •
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