It's taken a long time to get here, but I know that I am an expert in selling residential real estate. In fact, it took me a previous whole career spent in Corporate America to get here. My road was paved with tears, pantyhose, firing people and Christmas parties. My career path potholes are filled with too much wasted paper, overtime that I will never get back and paychecks spent and gone. When you work for a big company as I did, and I worked for the best, you can get to the point where no matter what your job title or responsibility, or the size of your check, you feel small. My employers were huge (Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Grubb & Ellis), so you can disappear fairly easily even if you're excellent at your job. It’s never anyone’s goal to disappear in Corporate America but it happened to me. There were literally hundreds of hours I would spend at my desk or in my office staring off into space wondering what it would be like to sell residential real estate on commission. Come on! I dared to dream of the far away mission. But I knew it was not for me. I was too dependent on a paycheck every two weeks. And yet I never wanted anything more in my life, career wise. Drifting toward real estate based work, I started fringing around the industry by working in lending, banking, development, and finally getting my license and working in commercial real estate (which I loved A LOT for eight years). But selling houses was so important to me that I couldn't shake it. When I finally left the commercial real estate world in 1999, and in 2000, I hung my real estate license for the first time with a residential real estate firm. The owner and woman who was my manager, Kristen Lee, took a huge chance on me. She taught me how to be a residential real estate agent and a mortgage lender. We did both things in our office. To makes ends meet though, and without telling my new manager, I secretly and somehow miraculously also got a $40,000 a year part-time job as a pharmaceutical rep. Part time was supposed to be 20 hours a week, leaving me 20 hours for me to get going in my residential real estate career going. But here's a shocker: Big Pharma demands a lot from every employee for travel, training and the work. 20 hours a week turned into 40 hours a week -- but with the part time wages. And calling on cardiac surgeons was not for the meek. I should have been paid accordingly for this intense, crazy work that I was supposed to be doing part time while getting good at selling houses on the side. Pharma ended up being a little too much. I quit cold turkey one day after calling my then fiancé in tears (I was right back to more corporate world tears). The only way to excel and become an expert in residential estate was to do it wholeheartedly with no fall-back position. Kerry pushed me to quit that day. Kerry and I got married in 2004. He's been my rock since the day I met him and he now hangs his license with Blend Luxury. In fact, he’s also now a broker as of 2017, so technically he’s a broker associate. Pharma got dropped at the end of 2002. Since then, and for over twenty years now, it’s been full time in residential real estate for me with failure never being an option. Along the way I became an expert and my dream job was finally mine.
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