It's My Anniversary!
/Ten years ago this month, I became a real estate agent.
It was a mid-life career change. I had spent my entire adult life, up to that point, as a speaker and writer, talking about the meaning of love. I still “loved” that work (pardon the pun), but the strain of the constant travel was getting to be too much. I didn’t want to travel any more. But I still wanted to help people, to do something to make their lives better.
Denver has always been special to me, and I was helping people find homes even when I wasn’t getting paid for it. So selling real estate fit the bill perfectly.
Over the past few days I’ve been reminiscing about the past decade. If you’ll indulge me, I thought I’d share just a few of those memories with you:
Signing with RE/MAX Alliance because they had offices — and hence fax machines — all over town. Because, in those pre-iPad days, if I couldn’t get to a fax machine, I couldn’t submit an offer.
My first closing, where the buyer’s agent (who had no idea how long I had been in the business) told me that she found it refreshing to work with me “instead of all of these new agents who don’t know what they’re doing.”
The years I made a lot of money and learned how to run a successful business. And the downmarket years when I learned that what goes up can indeed go down. And that, in the good market years, new furniture is nice but a healthy savings account is nicer.
Appearing in RE/MAX International commercials like this one: First Time Home Buyers
Learning about negotiation from the brilliant and hilarious real estate attorney Oliver Frascona, and earning the Certified Negotiation Expert designation from him just months before his tragic death last August.
Earning the Senior Real Estate Specialist designation so that I could help other people’s parents the way I helped my own parents when they moved out of their longtime home.
But the one continuous high point of the past decade has been YOU. All of you! You have trusted me to walk with you during an important and often stressful time in your lives. You have recommended me to your friends, family and neighbors. You came into my lives as my clients, and stayed as my friends.
This little “endeavor” of mine has been much more successful than I ever dreamed, thanks to all of you.
I can’t wait to see what the next ten years will bring!
Thank you all again, so much. And, as always, please call me if you’re thinking of buying, or selling, or just want to know what your house is worth these days.
