Take the one about showing homes to a relocated couple in the Federal Witness Protection Program. The wife had testified against a drug kingpin who then put a contract on their lives. Bromhal drove them around all day in an armored car, with one guard inside and two more following with guns cocked until they chose a house. She was terrified, she says, “but that’s what’s so exciting about real estate – the challenge.”

Everything about real estate is challenging to the 53-year-old York Simpson Underwood Realtor, one of today’s top Triangle agents, who leads The Laura Bromhal Team. And yet that career would never have occurred to the former art student when she was growing up in Roanoke Rapids.

Her parents are not surprised at her success. “She’s always been a winner,” notes her mother, Grace Boone, a former Powers model and radio talk show hostess. Her father, retired physician Woody Boone agrees: “Laura was chief cheerleader in high school, attended Governor’s School for art and then studied art history in Italy.” Bromhal in fact majored in art and home economics at Salem College and later transferred to Meredith College where she earned a B.A. in home economics. The story of how a serious art student metamorphed into a Realtor is another Bromhal gem. She was discovered in 1992 by Sam Simpson of Simpson and Underwood Realty in Johnson’s Drug Store schmoozing with other young mothers. By that time Laura had married, had two children, divorced and remarried.

Simpson had already learned from his partner Speck Underwood how the enthusiastic and indefatigable young woman managed to obtain funds from the downtown Raleigh merchants for a blaze of colored Christmas lights in the formerly drab metropolitan area.

Simpson says he was struck by her magnetic personality and ability to listen. “I thought if anyone is a people person, it’s Laura.” He invited Bromhal, then recently married to Bob Bromhal, to come to his office to discuss a real estate career. She accepted because “I didn’t want Bob to support my kids.” The agency sent her to real estate school.

A few months later, opportunity knocked again in a nail salon. Bromhal recognized prominent Realtor Ida Terbet across the room and breathlessly pounced on her with, “you don’t know me, but I am a beginning agent and you are my idol.” Terbet was flattered. “Nobody,” she recalls, “had ever approached me that way before.”

She asked Bromhal to accompany her to some listings and gave her advice: Don’t talk too much when you work with buyers, and pay a professional appraiser to measure the house. Bromhal was ecstatic: “I watched Ida in action and knew she was a real pro.”

Energized, Bromhal studied, got her real estate license and went to work. With no listings of her own, she spread her business cards all over town and volunteered to handle other agents’ phone duty and show their open houses.

At one of them in the Hi Mount community, she impressed a young couple who decided to list their own home with the newly anointed agent. “I sold it just like that,” she recalls. Afterward, she “bombarded” everyone in the neighborhood with letters informing them of the sale and purchase price and offering to do a free market analysis of their home. Almost immediately, Bromhal found herself selling houses for several people in that community. “Those homes were inexpensive,” she recalls, “but they led to a slew of referrals,” and more open houses, like the one in the Whitaker Mill neighborhood.

That’s where young homeowners Barbara and Mark Buckley first met the mesmerizing agent and were hooked. “It was her charismatic personality and genuine enthusiasm that was so contagious,” explains Barbara. “She was professional, hard working and totally committed to her task.” Bromhal sold their home as well as their next home before the couple moved to Virginia Beach. She also sold Mark’s father’s house.

Bromhal’s enthusiasm for her work and the hundreds of referrals she has received are largely responsible for the growth of the Laura Bromhal Team that boasts seven professionals including a licensed appraiser. In 2006, the team earned $45 million in real estate sales and for the tenth consecutive year has been named York Simpson Underwood’s number one agent in sales volume.

In 1994, Bob Bromhal started working with his wife as mortgage loan procurer and for many years was the team’s closing specialist. At 67, he is its problem solver. The couple live inside Raleigh’s Beltline in a 49-year-old 4,300-square-foot brick house they frequently loan to charitable organizations for special projects. As you would expect, their home is packed with beautiful paintings, sculpture and other objets d’art. The Bromhals also have a small getaway cottage in Morehead City where the team sells homes under its new-home sales division.

Laura’s high energy is derived in part from exercise. Rising every day at 5 a.m., she runs around the neighborhood for 50 minutes followed by an hour of weightlifting at a local gym. Then on to Third Place at Five Points where with café au lait in one hand and cell phone in the other, the agent with the slogan “Leave it to Laura” starts her business day.

That slogan is an apt description of Bromhal, according to clients Noel and Harold Lichtin, whose North Ridge home she sold. The Realtor also sold houses to each of the couple’s children. Says Noel Lichtin: “Laura is extremely driven to be successful and is going to make that sale, which is what you want for a Realtor.”

Those attributes will be especially helpful in the present real estate market, as Bromhal knows. Pointing out the market is much worse in other communities across the country, she admits that some of their problems have affected the Triangle because many people desiring to move here can’t buy another home until the old one is sold.

Bromhal notes, “It’s a buyer’s market and sellers need to be more creative and reasonable.” The Realtor vows to do her part: “I’ll show sellers how to get the most for their homes, even call the fisbos (for sale by owner) and knock on doors.”

Actually, Laura is noted for knocking on doors and using other aggressive methods to help her clients. A few years ago, a couple saw a beautiful old home in a prime location inside the Beltline and asked Bromhal to find out if it was for sale. The feisty agent knocked on the owner’s door but got no further because the woman curtly replied she wasn’t selling. Bromhal had just enough time to thank her before the door slammed in her face. Undaunted, she drew up a contract, enclosed it in an envelope with the client’s binder — a very sizable check — and left it for the owner. That evening the woman called Bromhal to accept the offer, and the sale went through.

Leave it to Laura.

E-mail Iris June Vinegar at irisjune11@aol.com.