Gerson Sixieme
Real Estate Agent
The plane comes in low over the water and there is no second attempt. For fourteen years, Gerson Sixieme worked aviation launch and recovery on the deck of an aircraft carrier, sending jets off the bow and bringing them back down safely. Every launch mattered. Every recovery mattered more. You do not get a do over on a flight deck, and you do not get one at a closing table either. That is still how he works. No shortcuts and no double standards. The family buying their first home gets exactly what the client buying their fifth gets, because Gerson does not keep a second version of himself for the bigger commission.
Gerson grew up in Port au Prince, Haiti, and he learned early what it means to be carried by other people. He was twelve when he lost both of his parents, and the years that followed were held together by neighbors, by his friends' parents, and by his church. People who fed him. People who checked on him. People who had no reason to show up except that he was theirs. He has never forgotten a single one of them, which is why to this day, when a name he has not heard in twenty years shows up on his phone from Haiti, he answers. His wife tells him he does too much. He tells her he cannot watch someone struggle and do nothing about it. That is not a business philosophy. It is just who he is, and it happens to make him very good at this work. He came to the United States by way of a medical mission. A nurse came to Haiti with a church team, and Gerson served as her interpreter, standing between her and a room full of patients, making sure every person walked out understanding exactly how and when to take their medication. Getting it right was not optional. He married her, followed her residency to Clarksville, Tennessee, and enlisted in the Navy from there.
Fourteen years. New Jersey. Pensacola. Virginia. More moves than most families make in a lifetime, and every one of them with his own boxes, his own lease, his own school enrollment paperwork, his own kids asking whether the new house would have a yard. When Gerson tells a military family he understands what a PCS actually costs them, he is not being polite. He has done it, over and over, and he has bought and sold homes of his own in the middle of it. He also went to school through all of it. An associate degree from Austin Peay State University in Clarksville in 2012. A bachelor of arts in Foreign Languages and Literature from Old Dominion University in 2021. A certificate in Homeland Security and Logistics and a Master of Science in Cybersecurity Risk Management, both from ODU in 2025. Fourteen years in uniform, six children under one roof, and a master's degree earned somewhere in the margins of both. When Gerson tells you he does not quit, that is not a slogan. It is a transcript.
Real estate found him through a friendship. There was a Realtor he called every single time orders came down, and somewhere in the middle of all those years the calls stopped being about houses and started being about life. They checked on each other. When Gerson was preparing to leave the Navy for medical reasons, that friend asked him a question he had never considered: why not get licensed yourself? Gerson had been handing him referrals for years and taking dinner as the thank you, because commission was never something either of them could do. So he took the shot. A scholarship covered his education, he earned his license in 2026, and he joined The Verity Group. Which tells you most of what you need to know about how he does business. Relationships over quick wins. Continuity over whatever today could earn. Gerson got into real estate because one relationship lasted long enough to change his life, and he has no interest in building a career that works any other way.
Who he serves best: Gerson is careful about claiming to be the best at anything. Ask him and he will tell you he is ready for whatever the transaction brings and willing to learn his way through it. But there are things life has handed him that no course teaches. He is raising six children. So when a growing family walks into a house, he is not looking at square footage. He is looking at where the shoes go, whether two boys can share that back bedroom without killing each other, how far the pediatrician is, whether the yard backs to something safe, which school district the sports schedule actually lives in. He knows what a family of eight needs from a pantry. He knows storage is not a luxury. He has moved to a country where he did not know the language, the customs, or a single street name. So when a buyer relocates to Hampton Roads from another country or from across the map, Gerson has already lived their week one. He speaks French and Haitian Creole alongside English, and he holds a degree in foreign languages, which is a sentence very few agents in Hampton Roads can write. For a family arriving from overseas, that alone changes the entire experience.
And he has strong feelings about renters. He watches families hand over two thousand dollars a month to a landlord while telling themselves ownership is out of reach, and he cannot let it go. He remembers his own 2.7 percent rate and he understands exactly why today's rate makes people freeze. He also knows the part that does not show up in the monthly payment. Equity. Appreciation. Kids thundering up and down the stairs at seven in the morning while nobody bangs on the ceiling below. He has lived in both versions. He will tell you honestly which one he would choose again.
Specialties: Military PCS relocation and VA loans, first time home buyers, growing families and move up buyers, international and out of state relocation, listings and sellers, new construction, investment property.
Service areas: Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Norfolk and the surrounding Hampton Roads communities. Gerson works with families reporting to Naval Station Norfolk, JEB Little Creek, NAS Oceana and Dam Neck Annex, and he knows the Newtown Road, Wesley Drive and Independence Boulevard corridors that run along the Virginia Beach and Norfolk line. He also knows the back roads out to the oceanfront and the beach house pockets most buyers never think to ask about.
Faith, family and the rest of it. Gerson will tell you plainly that when everything he tries stops working, he gets on his knees. He does not pretend he never gets discouraged. He gets discouraged and then he goes back to the only source of direction he has ever fully trusted, and he gets back up. He gives to veterans organizations and to his church, and he is the man who rounds up his change at the register for a cause he has never heard of, because someone once did that for him. He met Marie Angele in 2012 and flew to Madagascar to meet her face to face for the first time. They married in 2017. Their house holds six children: Cheney at thirteen, Samuel at eleven, Trinity at eight, Elijah at six, Yanissa at four, and Malik, the youngest. Four boys, two girls, one very full table. Outside of work he grills: steak, shrimp, whatever the day calls for. He takes the kids to Busch Gardens for the roller coasters they scream on and he never rides. He goes to the beach and sits in the sun without any intention of getting in the water. He watches cartoons with his kids, and yes, he checks the content, and yes, everyone is in bed by eight.
Ask him for a phrase that sums him up and he does not hesitate. If it's meant to be, it's up to me. Too many people are counting on him for it to be anything else. He cannot tell his family he tried. He cannot tell a client he is sorry it did not work out. If it is going to happen, he is the one who makes it happen, and he finds a way to get it done. Life, he will tell you, is for those who want to live it. He has watched too many people wait for permission they were never going to be given. A house is not paperwork to him. It is the address where somebody's next chapter starts, and he pays attention to that because he remembers what it was to not have one.
Working with Gerson means working with The Verity Group, one of the top producing teams in Hampton Roads, led by Heather and Steve Heishman. Our agents close hundreds of homes a year, and every client Gerson serves has that full team, that market data, and that marketing behind them from day one.
