The advice came from a grocer. H. Allen Tate Jr. was growing up in Gaffney, South Carolina, and his father recognized a talent for sales and customer service and suggested he go to Charlotte and get into real estate, according to the company’s own history. Tate graduated from the University of North Carolina and, on April 1, 1957, opened Allen Tate Co. at 112 South Tryon Street: one man, one office, selling real estate and insurance.
The firm that grew from that office is the one most Charlotte homeowners have dealt with, and the agent listed in our directory, Anita Sabates, works under a name that changed in 2025 for the first time in 68 years. Howard Hanna Allen Tate is the company now. The founder’s name is still on it.
It started with one-stop shopping
Tate’s idea in 1957 was what the company still calls one-stop shopping: a buyer or seller should be able to handle the house, the mortgage, the insurance and the closing in one place. The company grew steadily through Charlotte’s postwar expansion, and Tate ran it for decades before making the decision that shaped its second half.
In 1992 he recruited Pat Riley to help grow the Allen Tate Companies, along with a leadership team, and entrusted them to carry out his vision, in the company’s words. Riley took a firm with three offices in the Charlotte region and built it into one with 45 offices and more than 1,500 agents across four regional markets by the company’s 60th anniversary in 2017, when Tate’s dream was the theme of a rebranding campaign called We Are Home.
Tate died at his Charlotte home in 2015 at 84, still coming to work at the SouthPark headquarters in failing health, according to the company. By then the firm was ranked first in the Carolinas and among the top ten independent brokerages in the nation.
The people behind it
Riley served as president and chief executive and is now chairman, and in 2018 he engineered a joint venture with Howard Hanna Real Estate of Pittsburgh, another family company founded in 1957, that the industry treated as a template for partnerships between independent brokerages. He has been the architect of nearly forty acquisitions of other family-owned real estate firms, and the Charlotte Business Journal named both Riley and Tate among the 100 most influential leaders of the region’s past 25 years in 2025.
Riley’s civic record runs as long as his corporate one: chairing Charlotte Center City Partners, the Arts & Science Council and the Chamber, founding roles in the Charlotte Executive Leadership Council, and a FUNday event he created in 1999 that has raised more than $2.8 million for public education. He holds the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, the state’s highest civilian honor.
In August 2025 the company completed the partnership formed in 2018 and rebranded as Howard Hanna Allen Tate Real Estate, part of what it describes as the largest family-owned real estate company in the country: more than 15,000 agents and employees in more than 500 offices across 13 states, with more than 75 offices in the Carolinas.
The company’s homeownership model, real estate plus mortgage, insurance, relocation and title under one roof, was unusual in 1957 and standard now, and Allen Tate’s relocation department is one of the largest in the Southeast, handling corporate transfers into a region that adds tens of thousands of residents a year. The company’s headquarters moved from Tryon Street to SouthPark as the city’s center of gravity did, and Tate kept an office there into his final years.
What an agent offers
An Allen Tate agent like Sabates sells houses inside a company that also handles mortgage, insurance, relocation, title and new construction, which is Tate’s 1957 idea at national scale. The firm is a founding member of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, a network of independent brokerages in 30 countries, and has won that network’s highest awards more often than any other member, according to its listing there.
The agent is still the relationship. The company’s size means the agent’s client gets a network behind the transaction, and its history means the brand carries a trust built over seven decades in this specific market.
The 2025 rebrand completed a seven-year integration, and the combined company describes itself as the largest family-owned and operated real estate company in the United States. For the Charlotte market that means an agent under the Howard Hanna Allen Tate name works within a firm that ranks first in the Carolinas by sales, with more than 75 local offices, and that carries the Leading Real Estate Companies of the World network’s Diamond Award, its highest honor, six times. Riley, now chairman, remains the public face in Charlotte.
Why it matters
Charlotte’s growth is a story told in houses, and for 68 years the company that sold the most of them carried one man’s name. The grocer’s advice produced the largest brokerage in the Carolinas, a chairman who shaped the city’s civic institutions and, eventually, a national partnership that put a Pittsburgh name in front of a Charlotte one.
Tate’s goal was exceptional service and one-stop shopping. The signs say Howard Hanna Allen Tate now. The idea on them is still his.