"Who am I helping? What am I breaking?"

I’ve been selling real estate for 10 years. I like to call myself the psychedelic sheep of the industry because in this time I’ve discovered just how much I’m a colorful outlier in a field so often defined by the used car salesman characterization. On the buy-side I counsel my clients not to buy a property more often than to buy a property. On the sell-side I’m a walking billboard for the positives.

I grew up in a home where real estate and construction were learned via osmosis. My grandfather is the spitting image of the American Dream. Barely a middle school education, severely dyslexic, at a young age, he started a construction company. It’s there in the construction yard where my Mother and Father met. Romantic, right? My mother had built a career as a real estate paralegal, commercial underwriter and sales agent. Today, she’s the Productivity Coach at my firm, mentoring new agents.

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In writing this, I asked my Dad to share how he started working for my Mom’s father. Did he post an ad in The Fall River Herald? Did he know someone who worked for him? The way my Dad remembers it, he asked my Bup for a job no less than a dozen times. Bup never bit… until one day his crew quit and Dad got the call to start.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, real estate and construction are quite literally the building blocks of my DNA. I imagine my double helix chained together by 2x4s, TimberLok screws and shims. God is a Makita gal, never Ryobi. How could I know so much and yet know so little about how affordable housing gets funded or built? And worse, my family firmly fit into the category of people who would have benefited from it.

In the winter of 2024, my husband encouraged me to explore other avenues in real estate while I pursued a graduate degree (in you guessed it, real estate!), not leave it completely behind, but find something related that had better work-life balance and consistency. The market had been steadily on the rise since I became licensed in 2016, but was made worse by the pandemic and now, four-years later, was largely grid locked by inflated prices and higher rates. While many agents and brokerages boasted about highest priced sales, the grotesqueness of it all began to make me sick. I was watching homeownership slip out of grasp for so many. 30 transactions per year became less than half but with the same volume — evidence of the lack of affordability. It weighed on me. Was I just another cog in the capitalistic wheel? I mean, yes, only relieved by the understanding that we all are…

I’m reminded of a stanza from Bob Dylan’s poem “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie”:

“In this ocean of hours I’m all the time drinkin’
Who am I helping, what am I breaking
What am I giving, what am I taking”

That February I applied for and accepted a role as a Program Manager in affordable housing lending. The role was primarily responsible for the administration of state and proprietary funding sources. My eyes widened at a world I previously had no concept of. Like many, I had ignorantly reduced affordable housing to local housing authorities and Section 8 vouchers when in reality that doesn’t scratch the surface. I’d be willing to bet that I wasn’t alone and if you polled the national body of real estate agents, the large majority would have zero clue how affordable housing gets funded and built. Tragic, no?

Most of real estate happens on nights and weekends, so for the year and nine months I spent in affordable housing, I had two full-time jobs. Monday through Friday from 7:30AM to 4:00PM I poured over developer’s applications for funding, analyzed and drafted programming, communicated with our partners and managed a team of underwriters. And after hours I showed homes, negotiated contracts and guided individuals and families in purchases and sales. In many ways, the Program Manager position was not dissimilar from my duties as a broker. Truth be told, I loved it. Like sales, it was problem solving but the equations were new and the stakes were larger scale. I felt morally and philosophically aligned. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to become disenfranchised.

I came at program management the same way I did my career in real estate: excited, invested, efficient, dedicated. Had I spent too long in the private sector? Were the tropes about bureaucracy true? My bleeding liberal heart was broken. I thought I’d found a niche. Instead, I was pained by the agonizingly slow pace of progress. To know real estate is to practice it. No transaction is the same, each presents nuanced challenges that require one, some or all parties involved to rise to an occasion and with haste. Sometimes more than once or over and over throughout the process. What were small barriers on the outside of those walls, were Everest inside them. The court of public opinion sent decision makers into freeze-mode.

In 21 months, I didn’t expend a single dollar from the programs I stewarded, $4 million earmarked for housing, untouched.

I now know that part of taking that job had to do with being acutely aware of how broken the American real estate system is and for a brief time, I mistakenly included myself as part of the problem.

I got so caught up in being empathetic to the average American’s lack of access, I lost sight of the fact that my business allowed me to literally and proverbially open doors.

In October I left my detour in affordable housing behind, recognizing no substitute for the privilege to control outcomes as an advocate on behalf of my clients. My time in affordable housing lending brought me fresh perspective, deepened my working knowledge of the industry and woke me up to the importance of policy work and volunteerism. It taught me that advocacy in this field extends beyond just understanding the pulleys and levers of the trade but to be well educated and informed is to pay attention to what is happening on the local, regional, national and even global level. I learned yet again that two things can be true at once, the lack of affordability in America is heartbreaking and on a nuclear level I can be an educator and advocate for those participating in a system we can all agree is broken.

I love what I do and I’ve never been more excited to operate my business in ways that reflect my nerdiness, passion and enthusiasm for elements of the industry that extend beyond sales. My relationship to real estate is one that recognizes how important safe and affordable housing is to health and well being, one that feels a duty to educate myself both formally and informally and one that advocates for people’s goals whoever they are and wherever they are in their exploration.

On the hard days when so much of the industry feels antithetical to who I am, what I stand for and what I believe, I have to remember that I’m a helper and there are people who stand for what I stand for and believe what I believe who need help navigating these treacherous waters. Real estate is what I’m good at and we need helpers now more than ever.