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When Ennis Antoine’s father, Ennis Antoine Sr. retired from the military, he founded a church. Along with Antoine’s mom, Yvonne, he dedicated his ministry to serving others in their New Orleans neighborhood.
“My dad always said, ‘I don’t care how successful you are in life. You don’t forget where you came from, and you always make a difference,’” says Antoine, AHWD, EPRO, broker at Keller Williams West Atlanta, where he leads a team of 325 agents.
Service to others, he says, is the central purpose in both his real estate business and his life. Through volunteerism in both his community and the industry, he has helped expand housing opportunity and homeownership to countless others.
For his groundbreaking association leadership and advocacy, Antoine has been named a 2025 Fair Housing Champion by the National Association of REALTORS®. He was recognized at an April 10 Fair Housing Month event hosted by NAR.
When Antoine was 27, he and his parents obtained real estate licenses. He joined a large real estate company in New Orleans and set a goal of achieving independence. Within three years, he moved into his own apartment and started a family.
Then came the early 1980s: A worldwide oil glut sent the Louisiana oil industry and economy into a tailspin. Crime was on the rise, and Antoine and his wife wanted something better for their three sons. The family decided to move to Atlanta.
“We took a leap of faith,” he says.
In Antoine’s case, that leap was quite literal. The family didn’t know anyone in Atlanta, but that all changed when they found Jackson Memorial Baptist Church. The church’s members quickly became Antoine’s extended family and within its walls, he found community.
A Business Based in Service
The friends he made at Jackson Memorial helped Antoine build his real estate business. Many parishioners were first-time buyers. “Within four years, my business started to excel,” he says, as first-time buyer clients traded up and referred business to him. He expanded to working as the preferred agent in many new residential developments.
As his business grew, he remained committed to serving others through activities such as teaching Sunday school to the at-risk young men in his church and serving as a mentor in organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters and 100 Black Men. He says he feels a responsibility to show young men a better way of living and to expose them to new possibilities.
That includes the possibility to build wealth through real estate ownership, a goal that feels out of reach for too many.
“Fair housing is when an opportunity for affordable housing is presented to everyone,” he says.
In Antoine’s eyes, fair housing is just a dream if the communities that need the resources most don’t know where to find them or understand the ins and outs of the process. That’s why, using his church as a hub, Antoine regularly hosts financial literacy, first-time buyer and homeownership classes for the community.
As a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity for the past 16 years, devoting 150 hours each year, Antoine teaches homeownership courses and works alongside Habitat clients to build homes.
He also teaches courses on fair housing and unconscious bias courses to fellow members of the Atlanta REALTORS®.
Advocating for a Fair Path Forward
When Antoine became involved with the Atlanta REALTORS®, he says, there were few Black men and women serving in leadership roles.
Around 2012, Antoine began advocating for the association to better represent the community so that it could more effectively fight for fair housing for all Atlantans. He sought to grow the diversity of members, and when he became the first African American to serve as president of the Atlanta REALTORS ® in 2015, he began bringing local multicultural real estate groups together regularly to collaborate on solutions toward housing accessibility. In 2022 under Karen Hatcher, the first female African American president of the association, the board voted to give each of those outside groups voting representation at the meeting. “The goal was, I was going to change this industry and leave a legacy for those who look like me. You can't build success if you don't seek success.”
Antoine didn’t just focus internally. He also forged a relationship with Atlanta city officials to explore how the association and the city could work together to create housing opportunities. In addition, he helped create partnerships between real estate professionals and Invest Atlanta, an organization that seeks to advance Atlanta’s global competitiveness, including by helping Atlantans find downpayment assistance and other housing resources.
For the past 19 years, he has been an NAR federal political coordinator for Georgia’s 13th District Rep. David Scott, sharing NAR’s advocacy messaging on a range of topics including fair housing, affordability and protecting homeownership. He has advocated for several measures to expand housing opportunity, including measures to incentivize developers to add affordable housing to their plans HB 2143), the 2008–2010 tax credit for first-time homebuyers, and the 1997 tax act, which increased the federal capital gains exclusion to $250,000 for single filers and $500,000 for joint returns, a change that benefits the elderly who are often on a fixed income.
Too often, Antoine says, when people think of housing opportunity and fair housing, they’re focused on the color gap. He reminds people that fair housing supports a range of protected classes, and advocates for federal protections to extend to the LGBTQ+ community.
For him, fair housing is about inclusivity, mindset and environment as much as it is about race. It’s his personal ministry; one he says he’ll serve until the end of his days.
