Why I Became a Real Estate Agent (And Why It Has Nothing to Do With the Market)
People ask me all the time why I made the move into real estate. They expect an answer about opportunity, or the market, or loving houses. The real answer is harder to explain. It starts with my deep rooted desire for security: relational, financial, and housing.
Growing Up, Then Waking Up
I grew up in Presidio Heights. Beautiful 6 bed | 5 bath home, great school, fantastic community, the kind of childhood that looked really good from the outside. Burke's School for Girls. Sherith Israel. A tight community. A sense that things were solid.
But as I got older, I started to understand that what felt solid wasn't entirely real. My dad struggled with serious mental illness, and a lot of the financial security I took for granted was more fragile than I knew. My parents separated when I was in first grade. My mom, my sister, and I moved to a flat on 6th Ave and Lake Street, in the Inner Richmond, while my parents sold the Presidio Heights house on Clay St at Cherry. Eventually, my mom realized that private school wasn't in the cards anymore, and we moved to Mill Valley, where my sister and I attended public school.
My dad spent the rest of his life moving. Sometimes buying, sometimes renting, across San Francisco and Marin, never quite landing anywhere stable. In his final years, he suffered severe health issues and received psychiatric care through the VA. He lived in VA-provided low-income housing in the Tenderloin, halfway homes, and eventually board and care facilities where he lived out his days with hospice care. He passed away with no property, no savings, no will. Just, five months after my son was born.
I have lived on a lot of sides of the housing equation in this city. From a four-floored Presidio Heights home to watching a parent die without a place to call his own. That experience never left me. It shaped everything, including the choices I made as an adult when I started building a career and a life of my own.
Building Stability, One Decade at a Time
If security was the thing I was always chasing, Salesforce was where I found it, at least for a while. I spent over a decade there, on a world-class marketing team, working under leaders who were people I trusted, admired, and learned from. Many are now CMOs across the tech industry. I had salary, bonuses, stock, and career growth. I had a professional home.
I also, eventually, bought a real one.
In 2016, I was married, working in tech, with a two-year-old in preschool. We were renting in the Panhandle and decided it was time to try to buy. Homeownership had always been a dream for me, not just a financial goal. It was tied to something deeper: the need to feel rooted.
We found a place that didn't look like much at first. Our agent was great. The last house we saw on tour didn't immediately speak to me, so we walked away. It was a TIC in the Castro. It needed some work, but it did have this incredible walk out access to the yard from the backroom, and our agent helped us see the value in that for our young family. We quickly realized that Castro TIC was exactly what we needed. So we went back. We put in a preemptive offer at 15%, pieced together the financing with a TIC loan and a HELOC, wrote a heart felt letter (back when you still could), and we got it.
Then 2020 happened. The pandemic. School closures. And, separately, a marriage that had run its course. We separated, then divorced. I stayed in the house, alone, navigating the pandemic, crazy work from home schedules, home-schooling a kindergartner, paying for my life on one income, and feeling scared by my new reality of being a single mom.
By 2022, it was time to untangle our finances completely. I decided I wanted to stay in the home. I had been living there, paying the mortgage on my own, and I wasn't willing to let it go. So I refinanced, took out a buyout loan to pay my ex-husband his share of the equity, and became the sole owner on the mortgage.
A million-dollar mortgage on a single income is not a small thing. Neither is updating a trust, navigating a name change on a deed (word to the wise, don’t change your name when you get married), or doing any of this while also processing a divorce and raising a kid by yourself. It was stressful. Honestly, parts of it still are.
But I own my home. And that means something to me that I cannot fully put into words.
When the Other Foundation Cracked
Here is the part of the story I do not always lead with, but that I think matters.
After leaving Salesforce, I took on a head of platform marketing role at another major tech company. It felt like the right next step. It was not easy to leave a place I had called home for ten years, but I was ready to grow.
What I was not ready for was what came next. The post-pandemic era brought a wave of restructuring across tech: spans and layers, layoffs, operating cost cuts, leveling exercises. In just under a year, I was laid off. Two years later, from my next role, I was laid off again.
The financial security I had built over a decade in tech was gone. And honestly, so was some of my passion for the industry.
I sat with that for a while. And then I started paying attention to what had stayed constant through all of it: my belief in homeownership as a foundation. My home had been through a pandemic, a divorce, a refinance, and two layoffs. It was still there. I was still there. That mattered.
Why This Became My Work
The through-line of my life is a deep need for security: relational, financial, and housing. I have chased it in relationships, in career, and in the homes I have lived in. I have lost it and rebuilt it more than once. And what I know now is that of all the ways I have tried to build a stable foundation, owning a home has been the most lasting.
Every mortgage payment I make builds something for my son and for me. I am not paying someone else's investment. I am building my own.
That is why I became a real estate agent. Not because I love open houses (though I do). Not because the market is interesting (though it is). But because I know what it feels like to need this, and I want to help other people get there.
Especially people the system doesn't always make it easy for. Single women. People navigating a divorce. Solo parents. People who have had the rug pulled out from under them professionally and are trying to figure out what solid ground looks like now. I have been that person. I know that version of the math.
If you are wondering whether homeownership is possible for you in San Francisco, I want to talk to you. Not to sell you something. To actually think it through together. Contact me.
