Jenny Pruitt was a self-made woman in a good old boys club

Not by the biggest real estate crash since the Great Depression, or a lawsuit filed against her by one of multibillionaire Warren Buffett’s companies.

“She was a force,” said real estate agent and longtime friend Lisa Fuller.

Jenny Pruitt, a third-generation Atlantan and philanthropist who broke the glass ceiling for women as one of the city’s first female and most successful real estate brokers, died Friday from cancer. She was 85.

Petite and poised, Pruitt became a real estate agent in 1968, just as plans for a new and bigger Atlanta were coming to fruition in board rooms and back rooms across Atlanta. Within nine years, she was named as the broker at the company. Within two decades, Pruitt founded Jenny Pruitt & Associates with her husband, Bob, as chief financial officer. They had a clientele that sold and bought mostly high-end homes, many in the pricey Buckhead area, and she and her agents cashed in on billions of dollars worth of closings over decades.

David Boehmig, her longtime business partner and son-in-law, said Pruitt “clearly broke the glass ceiling from the standpoint of an entrepreneur being female and in the residential real estate business at her time.

“She was widely known and respected for that, and it wasn’t always easy,” he said. “It was a good old boy’s club until around that time.”

Agents who worked for Pruitt — many for years — described her as a firm boss, tough negotiator, person of strong faith, and close friend who was there for them in times of personal crisis.

Boehmig said Pruitt was a strong entrepreneur “with a good gut sense of what was the right way to grow and to serve the public.

“She was very decisive, insightful, and was a very good judge of character. She strongly believed that if you care about your people, then the bottom line with follow,” he said.

She sold Pruitt & Associates in 2001 to a Buffett-owned company.

She and Boehmig formed Atlanta Fine Homes Sotheby’s International Realty in 2007, when she was in her mid-60s. Almost immediately, the Buffett-owned company sued them claiming they violated a noncompete agreement.

Pruitt and Nancy See, a longtime employee recruited to become the broker at Atlanta Fine Homes, worried together.

“That’s when she and I became very fast friends, in addition to being employer and employee,” See said. “We had no assurances that we would win; we had no assurances that our company would prevail.”

See, who worked for Pruitt for 30 years said the lawsuit taught her two important things about Pruitt.

“Her decisions were based on faith and how she felt God was leading her,” See said. “She was also very determined and fearless.”

The lawsuit was eventually dismissed. The real estate market would collapse shortly after that because of the Great Recession, but the company would come back strong.

Kay Quigley, a longtime real estate salesperson and friend, said Pruitt never met a stranger or forgot a person’s name.

“She was always there, always smiling,” Quigley said. “She was really amazing.”

Cathy Davis Hall, an Atlanta Fine Homes real estate agent recruited by Pruitt 16 years ago, said that when she told her bosses she was quitting to join Pruitt’s company, they said: “We understand. Jenny Pruitt — you never say no to.”

Nothing in Pruitt’s upbringing suggested what her future would hold, and the media-savvy self-made woman talked openly about that. Her father died when Pruitt was 8, and her mother faced trouble keeping the family together. They moved in with relatives, and Pruitt said she worried she and her brother and sister might end up in an orphanage or, worse, split up and placed in different foster homes. She said that was the first time she recalls ever calling out to God for help.

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Pruitt’s family didn’t have money to send her to college. She scraped together the funds to take a couple of classes at Georgia State University that she said helped her develop her understanding of business. She later established a lifelong bond with the school, which inducted her into its Business Hall of Fame and to which she endowed a scholarship fund with at least a six-figure sum for needy real estate students — she never publicly said exactly how much it was.

Later, Pruitt became a benefactor of dozens of local nonprofits and charities, including Habitat for Humanity, the Atlanta Humane Society and the Shepherd Center. She served as a director of the Buckhead Coalition, a member of the board of directors of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and the Board of Councilors of the Carter Center.

In 2015, Pruitt released a book, “Beneath His Wings,” about her walk of faith in the marketplace.

She and Bob were married for more than 50 years. A public memorial will be announced at a later date, Boehmig said.

Pruitt, a dog lover, spent many of her final days on the sofa with her pooch, Gracie. She had been fighting cancer for about the last two years. But that did not stop her.

A week before her death, she hosted a small dinner party for six at her home in Peachtree Hills. It was beautifully done, with the loveliest flowers, linens. silver, and food, said best friend Nancy See.

“Everything that Jenny did was to perfection,” she said.