Shannon Malcom doesn’t talk about fair housing as a concept. She talks about it as a responsibility. It shows up in how she trains agents, how she advocates for policy and, perhaps most clearly, in how she treats the people who walk through her doors—especially the ones who have been told, explicitly or implicitly, that they don’t belong.
“I remember what it felt like to feel unworthy of somebody’s time,” Malcom says.
Long before she became the owner and qualifying broker of EXIT Realty Birmingham, in Alabama, Malcom’s life was defined by instability. As a child, she faced poverty and housing insecurity. Though her great-grandmother was present and stepped in when she could, Malcom bounced around from one rental to another with her parents. After her father passed away when she was nine years old, Malcom faced many forms of child abuse from a stepfather and drew into herself.
“I didn’t want anyone to see the life that I lived,” she recalls.
She escaped the abuse as a teenager, but there were many nights she didn’t have a place to stay, so she would spend the night in abandoned homes. Malcom’s great-grandmother gave her an ultimatum when she found out the high school senior was pregnant: Get rid of the baby or leave the family
Malcom opted to move into a tent on a KOA campground with the baby’s father, and they got married. As a young adult and now wife, however, her situation didn’t improve. She faced abuse from that first marriage to her son’s father, and found the courage to leave him, but not before she learned she was pregnant with her daughter. She also succumbed to alcohol and drug addiction. Initially, she was a functional addict.
“I was able to stay up for days, able to do all the things that I needed to do,” she remembers. “I held a full-time job. I came home. I cooked dinner for my children. I gave them their baths, I tucked them in and I read them a story every night.” But eventually, she crossed a line and became so physically dependent on methamphetamines that everything started to deteriorate.
She hit her bottom after several months in a jail cell. At the time she was arrested, she and her now-husband and business partner, Rob Malcom, were using drugs together, living in his car and “on a path of destruction.”
She attended recovery meetings by court order after her release from jail, and it was in that space where her faith was restored. In the recovery rooms at Christian Life Fellowship in Calira, Ala., she realized she had a second chance at a future.
She soon found a path to real estate and understood for the first time the power of homeownership to provide stability and change someone’s life, and she wanted to help others find that security.
A Lived Understanding of Access
For Malcom, fair housing is about correcting the quiet, everyday barriers that keep people from seeing homeownership as something available to them, and that starts with her agents. She and Rob pull from their personal experiences and their faith to lead their more than 50 agents across three brokerages.
“When Rob and I opened our brokerage, we really had a vision that we wanted our business to be grounded with a foundation of faith,” she says.
She remembers interviewing agents, most of whom had overcome obstacles and dark pasts, and understanding her own experience could help show these agents that a bright future was possible.
“Shannon doesn't just care about you as a number and the numbers you bring in,” says Hannah McCandless, a real estate agent and team leader in Malcom’s office. “She cares about you as a person.”
McCandless had already been in the business for 10 years when she joined Malcom’s brokerage.
“My business was running me,” McCandless recalls. “My health was deteriorating and I didn't have any systems in place. Shannon met me where she saw me and was able to guide me to where this year, after 10 years in the business, I was able to hit over six figures with her guidance and her processes.”
Malcom’s approach to training embodies the same philosophy. She teaches agents how to recognize bias, expand opportunity and meet clients where they are—financially and emotionally.
“Shannon treats everyone the same,” McCandless says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re looking at a million-dollar home or a $30,000 house. Everyone’s cared for the same.”
From Training Room to Policy Table
Malcom’s commitment to housing access extends beyond her brokerage and into advocacy. In Birmingham, Ala., a city where the legacy of redlining and housing inequity is still visible, Malcom has become an active voice in shaping a more equitable housing landscape.
Her involvement with the Birmingham Association of REALTORS® began with curiosity. After learning about the association’s advocacy work, she sought out conversations about policy, development and housing access. That engagement quickly evolved into leadership, including serving as chair of the association’s advocacy committee.
For Ryan Adams, the association’s vice president of government affairs, Malcom’s impact was immediate.
What set her apart, however, was how she connected that policy work back to people.
Adams recalls a moment that crystallized it for him: learning, almost by accident while on a tour of a town neighboring Birmingham, about the scale of Malcom’s work. She and her husband had been quietly renovating abandoned homes—some of which were those same homes where she spent nights as a teenager—and returning them to the market.
Adams called her immediately and asked her why she’d never brought it up, but to Malcom, it was just the work she felt called to do to help meet the needs of her community.
He told her, “This is a huge thing that needs to be celebrated. I mean, you are not only rehabbing beautiful parts of our city; you're also providing fair and attainable housing to all these people that are out there. This is something that needs to be celebrated.”
Protecting Opportunity as Neighborhoods Change
In Birmingham’s Norwood neighborhood—a historically significant and diverse community in the midst of restoration—Malcom has been involved in efforts to balance revitalization with preservation. As homes are renovated and values rise, she has advocated for ensuring longtime residents benefit from that growth rather than being displaced. She’s personally renovated 50 of the neighborhood’s homes and is on the board of the Norwood Resource Center, where she champions fairness and works against displacement so legacy families can remain in the neighborhood.
“We wanted to make sure that our neighbors understood that we weren't trying to push them out, that we were trying to provide them more equity so that they too could do renovations to some of the homes that they lived in that may have had deferred maintenance,” Malcom says.
Mitch Hughes, president of the Norwood Resource Center, says that one of the ways the organization helps the neighborhood’s current residents is by partnering with organizations to provide grants for home improvements like new roofs or necessary renovations.
He also notes that the Malcoms are focused on fixing up homes that were otherwise in disrepair.
“They bought homes for the most part that had been run down, that needed renovation to bring the neighborhood back.”
It’s a nuanced approach, one that acknowledges both the need for investment and the risk of inequity. That balance is part of why colleagues and community members point to Malcom’s work as an example of what fair housing looks like in practice.
“When I think about what Shannon’s impact is on fair housing, it’s not about making sure a certain amount of people get certain amount of opportunities,” says Hughes. “It’s treating everybody with respect, treating everybody with dignity and helping everybody reach that goal of home ownership.”
A Standard, Not a Checkbox
Malcom knows what it means to be on the outside of systems—housing, financial, social—and to be underestimated within them. She also knows what it takes to move from that position into stability and, eventually, leadership.
Her journey informs how she shows up in classrooms, in policy conversations and in one-on-one client interactions. It also informs what she expects from the agents she trains. Fair housing, in her view, isn’t a box to check or a course to complete. It’s a standard to live up to consistently and without exception.
