Real estate attracted me because in many ways it’s ultimately unsolvable, and it’s so very undeniably and imperfectly human.
Happy almost-end-of-the-year!
It's been a big, strange, long, exciting, challenging one—for me certainly, and I think for many others. I’ve not written in a while, so I have a lot to say about, well, a lot of things; spend two seconds with me and you’ll find out quickly there’s very little I don’t feel strongly about. I’m infinitely curious about the world, so there's always something new to discover and to deep-dive, a new niche for every hyper-fixation I could ever have.
I rarely sleep in because once I wake up I get so excited about all the things that might happen in the day ahead I simply have to get up and find out. I still love coffee because it's like doing drugs, and fuels the excitement—let's goooo, meat’s back on the menu, boys!
So, because there’s a lot to say, I’m going to MENTION IT ALLLLLL (RHONY fans, I see you and I honor you). I'm going to publish here weekly. The posts might not always be great but they’ll always be good, and I’m going to trust that things left unsaid or said imperfectly will serve as fodder for future posts, such that eventually the collective contents of this digital space will offer some semblance of one person’s reflection on life through the lens of an industry that is impossibly fragile and complex.
Welcome! I’m so glad you’re here. Welcome to my version of real estate—a realm in which I consistently try to find and fill the spaces between what I’m legally and ethically bound to uphold, with creative liberties and picturesque moments and intriguing imperfections. There are human stories here, there’s buttoned-up business, and there are granular details that go unnoticed by so many despite constituting the entire foundation of a trade.
I’m interested in it all.
The spray-painted “x” on sidewalks that I never knew signified a sewer lateral inspector had been by. The staggering number of variations on "white” (paint, but also maybe my skin tone across seasons). The heart-wrenching circumstances that thrust a person down on their luck into challenging transactional choices. The energy it takes to support that person beyond mere fiduciary duty—because you want to, desperately—while still maintaining professional boundaries because you're an agent not a therapist, and yet. The ways you can privatize an exclusive-use common-area balcony without altering it permanently. The ways you can alter a floor, permanently.
The nuances within a single city block, or across a single building that manages to span two cities because of funny mapping, one half's sidewalk well-kept, the other in disarray—and how that gets marketed without discrimination.
Do you ever read the contracts you sign? I do. I’m obsessed with the state contracts we use in real estate, I love the county-specific addendums, I love when new versions of forms are released and I get to highlight the changes and consider the potential ramifications and why they were made. I love mandated disclosures. I love helping buyers understand what they’re reading, and helping sellers articulate the history of their homes clearly and appropriately without doing themselves a disservice by miscommunicating.
And yet this is also the hardest job I’ve ever had; if it’s not one challenge, it’s another—and it’s ever-changing, unstable, and unpredictable. Success in this industry largely depends on being able to identify and internalize—usually very quickly—an enormous number of factors forever unique to a given scenario, and then understanding how they might fit together in a variety of ways, and then carving a path for client(s) that best suits them. All while minimizing risk, making sure all parties are treated fairly, and if you're lucky, managing to make everyone feel like they reached a satisfying outcome.
It asks you to give up a significant amount of your life in service of others, largely on their schedules, to be constantly learning and adapting, to push hard and fast in moments while maintaining an enduring underlying patience. You have to set your own boundaries because everyone will insist you push them. While you're at it, make sure you're comfortable being the scapegoat for fear-filled parties looking for relief, because there’s just so. much. fear. It’s so much money it’s a life choice it’s complicated it's unknown risks it's future liability—the fear alone is pervasive, and infectious.
You will always be expected to know too much, and you will never be able to know it all.
You will always need to be the adult in the room.
There's a saying that the longer you’re in this business, the thicker your skin becomes and the thinner your hair.
I know, I know: but you get paid well! The commission earned by those unscrupulous and undeserving agents (or “real-turds” if you ask Reddit, which...is kind of funny and I know a few I might categorize as such myself), it’s criminal! For doing “hardly anything!”
Yes, if you can make it in this industry, you stand to be well-paid. And: Despite this for some reason being the job in popular culture that people tend to make out as the highly accessible midlife-crisis, back-up, just-give it-a-shot-if-you-can’t-do-anything-else job, I absolutely do not recommend trying to become and stay a full-time realtor. Becoming a real estate salesperson is easy, taking classes and passing a license exam is easy. Becoming a good agent is challenging. Being a great, accomplished, career agent, is very hard.
In fact, 87% of agents "fail out" before they get past five years in the business.
The Why of it All
So, why am I doing this? Why am I, a person who has sworn ever and always by her need to create, to leave behind some kind of legacy so that when she moves on there’s more than just memory but rather something of her own authoring, a person who grew up thinking real estate agents were at worst complete hacks and at best sort of an ineffectual and desperate Annette Bening in American Beauty—why am I continuing to pour so much of my time and energy into being, at the end of the day, a salesperson?
What’s so compelling, fulfilling, interesting, worthwhile about being a salesperson? (Sidenote: I’m literally getting my broker license in the spring in no small part so that I can legally title myself “broker associate,” that’s how much I rail against the salesperson reality).
After a decade in marketing communications for higher education and then e-commerce, I waded into real estate by accepting a job overseeing marketing for a couple agents for a few years, during which time I had the opportunity to see how the industry runs—what works and doesn’t—and how intricate it all is, and I realized three things:
- It’s a phenomenally more artful and challenging industry than I gave it credit for.
- It's poorly represented to the general public.
- I could improve it.
Big main character syndrome, hi hello! Perhaps yes, but I like puzzles and I hate inefficiency so those three points above were reason enough for me to jump in: in short order I got licensed, fired by the agent employing me for marketing, and adopted as a full-time agent by the brokerage of my soon-to-be mentors. I had a lot of will and not a lot of plan, and/but these years later here I am more excited and in love with this business than ever.
Why this though, right? When I could solve problems and fix industries as a consultant or any other number of jobs—what is it about real estate that has me still here when I wouldn’t fancy myself to be “passionate” about “real estate” like plenty of people proudly pronounce and genuinely feel?
Where We Choose to Live
This next bit is going to be The Most annoying thing perhaps I’ll ever say, but I realized—or got the closest I will to realizing—what my real “why” is when I was reflecting on the novel that I wrote a few years ago. (THERE IT IS she said it wow that line survived this post’s edits and it’s part of the narrative now, she’s like that wino in Sideways carrying around an untouched tome cum outsourced ego instead of actually doing something about it).
Yep, so in that yet-unpublished-because-I-haven't-even-emailed-a-single-agent-or-editor-but-surely-spectacular piece of speculative fiction, the protagonist is a realtor in the after times, post- near-societal-collapse. The real estate industry is barely an industry anymore but perseveres as one of fourteen centralized departments of the remaining/new government that’s been fashioned at least in part as a direly needed mimicry of the before, because people cling to what they know. Agents spend their days remapping cities by traveling in concentric circles from city centers out towards the coast/borders, knocking on doors to see who lives where anymore—who's claimed what, that being about as much as stands as ownership anymore—and recording it.
The protagonist is self-deprecating about her work when it comes up in conversation, but as another character points out to her one night (and thus I, Analise, who wrote this, must think this too on some level): this is what future generations or other beings or what have you, who stumble across whatever written record is preserved, will see as our world’s makeup on some level: who lives where.
Back here in our nonfiction world, people choose to buy a home, people feel so strongly about occupying a space that they want to own it, to plant a possessive flag in the ground so badly that they’ll pay to put their name on something others can’t take away from them (yeah yeah I’m leaving a lot of caveats out here). That is, on some level, crazy! Equity-building and practical considerations aside, we choose to buy or sell and buy again etc, and often to put our life savings into it no less, to assert a small but mighty physical claim on some part of the world, to literally make part of the earth ours. It’s a record of our existence, of us having occupied a space, and made a choice, and lived there. Been a human being there.
Our collective choices of where to live for various reasons personal to us reflect and catalyze greater wants and needs, and in response to those wants and needs we refine and develop cities and thus societies and therefore worlds.
That I, as an agent (technically, definitionally, a special agent—fun!), get to be a part of the evolution of a building, of tons of buildings, of cities, by facilitating the transfer of lives across stories and geographies and generations (sometimes literally within a family!), is crazy.
"Under All is the Land"
That’s why I always come back to the first line of the preamble of the National Association of Realtors’ Code of Ethics, “Under all is the land.” It’s about how we as agents are stewards of that land. The code also declares, “let the public be served.”
And that’s the point of us. And I think that’s so cool—we realtors are, at our best, here to serve the public, to try and protect their interests on individual levels, for the sake of the greater order, to facilitate the literal changing of land through ownership, improvements, etc.
And yes, maybe it seems like I’m making a lot of this, like I’m truly insane here when we’re talking about me being a realtor hah, but it does feel like there’s a bit of nobility and intrigue in this, if done right. And that is what I want.
I’m obsessed with existence, and I’m obsessed with humans having the capacity to be aware of their own choice to author a life (whether you believe in true free will or not). So being able to help people drill down into what they care about and why and help them achieve something that’s a fundamental part of at least one minor chapter in their life, is pretty sick. I like people solving, and I’m good at it, and it feels like a waste not to champion that in myself.
It’s like what they say about reading books—it allows you to live 1,000 lives instead of one; my current job, and every job I’ve ever had (camp counselor, tutor, events coordinator, marketing director, and now this) asks me to connect as effectively and genuinely as possible with countless different kinds of people in service of making things happen for them in ways they can appreciate personally based on who they are. None of this is life or death, but it is near and dear to hearts and asks for a lot of trust and a ton of empathy.
Honestly? I love power, I do (definitely for better and worse), but fortunately my villain arc is on hold because I like, more specifically, empowerment. I love teamwork (ask my husband, I cry in any TV show or movie the moment characters come together in service of something). Shared experience and gracious empowerment and teamwork keep humans from being selfish and destructive which we often default to at our worst, so it feels important to me that if you are (if I am) a capable person, you and I offer some of that capability to carry more of the load to balance out those who won’t, so that the overarching scales of society stay tipped in the right direction for the greater good.
Again—this is like anime-level magnanimity disguised as a post about being a realtor so I’m so sorry lmao and if you’re ready to bow out now, thanks so much for joining see you never, but I can’t help it this is genuinely how I see things.
Real estate attracted me because in many ways it’s ultimately unsolvable, and it’s so very undeniably and imperfectly human.
Enough Already—What's Next?
So! Everything in this giant meandering self-important essay to say: the reason I’ll be writing this blog is intrinsically bound to my overarching “why,” so that felt important to explain before I grace you in coming weeks with a wild variety of essays big and small on everything from electrical panel varieties to local top-five-restaurant lists to interviews with insurance brokers about what the actual f*** is going on in California to a meditation on the mediation paragraph in California’s Purchase Agreement, to a visual feast of the ways some of my favorite buyers transformed a small house to suit a growing family—including the longer story about how the house didn’t appraise at value WHEN WE ONLY WON IN A MULTIPLE-OFFER-SCENARIO BY LITERALLY $3,000 thanks to my tremendously dogged yet polite negotiating skills and thus had no choice as to “value” if we wanted to win AND how I submitted a compelling appraisal rebuttal to no avail and how that house is now worth so much more and has become the happiest ending for that family. YEAH, WHEW, WOO!
For years I’ve found myself wanting so badly to share the realities of this industry, how it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, how it’s the most bizarrely interesting thing I've ever done, how it’s so different than what the media suggests it is (except some of the high-stress excitement of negotiations, that does happen occasionally).
More than anything, I want people to be able to understand how much of the world we all take for granted is built, literally, on a complex network of physical systems whose responsibility is dictated by a breathtaking number of delicate conversations and contracts and checks and balances.
How at the end of the day, “real estate” is a study in human beings wanting to crystallize the ambiguities around them into something personal, their fighting to be able to do that, their coming up against obstacles to that and finding ways to circumvent those. It’s a study in understanding how inequality and opportunity define the world around us for better and worse.
Thank you for reading even this first flush of reflections, I’m looking forward to sharing a lot less about me and a lot more about the mundane and beautiful and contractual pieces of this totally strange and compelling industry with you.
Yours, Analise
PS: On the occasion of this first post, as much for this blog as for my business and my life: I remind myself here not to let perfect be the enemy of good. I remind myself here to trust myself to know what I know, and to communicate that effectively, even when imperfectly, and that that’s enough for this.
