Series Arc
“I had ridden the great housing tsunami, soared financially, doubling my income annually early on in my career, then crashed and hit the “riprap” or the rocky shores of the housing market crash, then drowned by the occasional unstable client or disreputable fellow realtor, been resuscitated, promised myself I would quit this crazy business, changed offices, lost every penny of savings including my 401-K. Then made more money than I have ever made in my life in alternate years.”
Act I: A Career Begins in Crisis
The series begins in September 2001, with Victoria seated in her DC real estate licensing class at the Fannie Mae Foundation on Wisconsin Avenue when the instructor announces that the Twin Towers have been hit and that Washington may also be a target. Her return to DC and her entry into real estate begin under the shock of national catastrophe.
From that first day, Victoria’s professional reinvention is inseparable from the city’s instability: the Pentagon attack, the start of the longest war in American history, the “Tech-Wreck,” and the collapse of her communications consulting work all push her toward becoming a licensed realtor in DC, Virginia, and Maryland.
“My life had been lived like a female Tom Hanks in the film, “Forest Gump” (1995), always at the epicenter of many major historical events however, only tangentially involved and effected. This was how it was and had always been from my hometown of Baltimore (1960s) to Atlanta (1990s) and now in the new millennium in Washington, DC.”
“It is said that it takes three events to jettison you into your next realm of existence. My trinity of DC events was explosively marked in 2001, first with “9-11”, then the beginning of the longest war in history and the consequential “Tech-Wreck” or crash of the tech giant’s stock market in 2002.”
Victoria’s life is directly impacted professionally and financially when she notes, “I would also consequentially be forced to leave my formerly lucrative communications consulting jobs and ostensibly transform myself as I had a few times prior, from teacher, fundraiser-publicist and most recently, communications consultant now, I would morph into a licensed realtor.”
Act II: Baptism by Fire in the DMV
Victoria earns her DC, Virginia, and Maryland licenses and joins a Georgetown brokerage, only to sell no homes during her first six months. With no local network after eighteen years away, she goes broke, nearly breaks down, and discovers that the emotional pressure of real estate can feel as intense as an emergency room.
Her personal instability mirrors the city’s. Unable to afford a home in the market she is trying to sell, she rents at the historic Kennedy Warren in Cleveland Park, where renovation noise, urban legend, and presidential history surround her while she tries to rebuild her life.
As construction shakes the building and the DC sniper attacks heighten the atmosphere of fear, Victoria’s “baptism by fire” becomes both literal and symbolic: she is learning a new profession while living inside a city and a life under renovation.
Ironically, she is unable to put down roots or purchase a home in the expensive DC housing market, even though she is in the business of buying and selling homes, so she takes a rental apartment at the historic, Kennedy Warren in the posh northwest neighborhood of Cleveland Park.
She had seen the building featured in a coffee table size book entitled, “Washington DC’s Top Ten Addresses”. Here she learns that local legend has it, that many senators and congressmen use to keep apartments for their secretaries hence the nickname, “The KW” or “Kept Woman”.
The KW is rich with lore and legendary events like in the ballroom downstairs where President Bill Clinton had held one of his inaugural balls and where many past presidents have held theirs. There is even an old bowling alley in the basement.
And then the new construction on the original lobby begins the month she moves in when a new wing or addition of 200 more units is also taking place. And since her apartment is one level above the lobby the noise becomes untenable, hence adding more stress, to her already beyond breaking point reentry back to DC,
Here she states, “My life like the Kennedy Warren was about ready to undergo one hell of an urban renewal renovation!”
And that’s not the only thing that is changing for hers is a literal “baptism by fire” and becomes an even more bizarre and frightening reentry to the city, when a man in a white truck has been going around shooting people randomly in DC and Virginia parking lots.
Act III: The Characters, Deals, and Meltdowns
The Georgetown brokerage gives the series its ensemble cast. Victoria meets a group of agents whose past lives and present antics make the office feel part workplace, part theater, part survival course.
Among them are Darrell, the beloved manager and former Vienna Boys Choir singer; Tony, a former Los Angeles and off-Broadway performer; and Jim, an opera-trained singer and teacher. Together, they turn office parties into impromptu musical numbers as “The 3 Realtors,” setting Broadway lyrics to the business of buying and selling homes.
The series also follows Victoria into ethically complicated and emotionally explosive episodes, including “All is Fair in Real Estate,” where dating “crazy Craig” complicates a property sale, and “The Gangster and The Thief,” where a developer’s fifteen listings trigger betrayal, lost commissions, and another professional collapse.
Her stories are also peppered with personal anecdotes as in the story, “All is Fair in Real Estate” where her life becomes even more spicy when she meets and begins dating a man who she nicknames “crazy Craig”. “Little did I know then that his “man-opause” insanity combined with my hormonal shifts of menopause would begin with and create a cataclysmic reaction and unprecedented emotional nuclear meltdown for us both.”
Knowing that she can’t sell Craig’s and his alleged former partner’s property due to a conflict-of-interest and her romantic involvement with him, Victoria refers the home sale to another iconic character and longtime Grande Dame realtor, Thyla. She claimed her career started when she worked for Ted Kennedy as his assistant and then when his tenure as Senator ended she jumped into the real estate business.
Act IV: Collapse, Exit, and Return
Near the end of the series, Victoria reaches another breaking point after losing the financial promise of fifteen developer listings she had worked on for a year. The setback forces her to confront how often real estate has brought her to the edge, financially and emotionally.
When she states, “It’s been my experience throughout my life that sometimes you win and sometimes you learn and that sometimes you have to have a breakdown before you can have a breakthrough!”
After her colleague undermines her relationship with the developer and management rewards that colleague with the larger share of the commissions, Victoria decides to leave full-time real estate. Her therapist urges her to find steady work and get out of the business that has repeatedly pushed her toward collapse.
This is one but not the final chapter entitled “The Gangster and The Thief”, when Victoria learns, after the fact, that this fellow realtor that she had invited to share the listings, had been asked to leave her prior office because she had been arrested for shoplifting.
Then their mutual company management rewards this same colleague (the thief) with the lion’s share of the commissions for the fifteen listings that the developer (the gangster) had originally awarded to her.
This series of events, developments and setbacks brings Victoria to the brink of real estate insanity and so she begins to look for other work when her therapist states, “I don’t care if you go to work at Costco or Walmart, but I want you to get a steady paying job and get the hell out of this crazy business that has drivin’ you to the edge more than once!”
Her response, “Speaking of hell, if you asked me what my definition of the job from hell is, I would tell you it was working retail at a big box, windowless, cavernous, store with a lot of BIG PEOPLE buying BIG ITEMS and BIG BOTTLES of BIG ALCOHOL?”
A series of short-lived jobs eventually leads her to Apple Carnegie Library, the company’s flagship store in the restored building at Mount Vernon Square. There, her real estate life is unexpectedly bookended by a new role at one of the most successful technology companies in the world.
“The newly restored architecturally award-winning building, in historic, Mount Vernon Square is where I would end up after leaving my fulltime work as a realtor, where at the Grand Opening, I’d meet CEO and Co-Founder Tim Cook and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Resolution
The series closes as history circles back to Victoria’s doorstep: the January 6 attack on the Capitol occurs only twelve blocks from the Capitol Hill home she bought fifteen years earlier. After the insurrection and the end of the longest war in American history, she returns to full-time real estate with a hard-won understanding of the business, the city, and herself.
