“I Will Never Become a Realtor!”

The Accidental Realtor by Victoria Hall

In exploring potential mid-life careers, the one job I assured myself I would never consider was that of a real estate agent. Afterall, wasn’t that something our mothers did in their spare time to fend off the boredom, and who didn’t qualify for any other type of work? And for heaven’s sake, I had a master’s degree from George Washington University in Behavioral Science and Education.

Yet time, desperation and shifting economies, have a way of tempering one’s earlier firm convictions. And it was the beginning of a real estate market where a home was no longer just a place to live, it was AN INVESTMENT, and most people’s greatest asset.

So, when my back was to the wall after my relocation to Washington, D.C. I became a real estate agent. As a realtor in our Nation’s Capital — one of the top three real estate markets in the Country — for the past twenty years, I have ridden the great housing tsunami.

D.C. is one of the country’s most solid housing markets, in part because of the wealth of jobs, security and employment diversity. Much of this is driven by what I describe as the “EDS, the MEDS & the FEDS” – the academic institutions, colleges, and hospitals such Georgetown, American University, Johns Hopkins and not the least of which is the Federal Government. This translates into a housing market that accumulates more equity for home buyers than any other market nationwide.

But there are no certainties in life nor are there any guarantees, even in the most foolproof housing markets. Since becoming a Realtor, I have soared financially, doubling my income annually early on in my career, then crashing and hitting the “riprap” or the rocky shores of the housing market, drowned, been resuscitated, promised myself I would quit this crazy business, changed offices, lost every penny of savings including my IRA. Then made more money than I have ever made in my life in alternate years. It’s been one hell of a roller-coaster ride!

I have – on the professional Richter scale – been relegated to the lowest level of job status, buried in the professional rubble, and treated at times worse than a used car saleswoman. Then, on other occasions, I have been revered and treated as a real estate goddess with the power to bestow happiness and a healthy investment of a home, on my very nervous, still skeptical, first-time homebuyers.

As a real estate agent, you become a target for the free advice vultures at parties or other gatherings, much like many physicians do. They circle and circle then pounce and ask things like, “What is the condition of the real estate market?” “How much is my house is worth?” Should I sell or buy or invest or divest?”

The questions are so frequently overwhelming that I have often defied what any good realtor is supposed to do, and market the out of myself and secure as many referrals as possible. Turn-about is fair play after all.

Then at other times, I let everyone everywhere know, from the bank and grocery stores lines to lavish parties, that I am yes indeed a REALTOR of the highest degree and definitely want to be yours!

I’ve pretty much seen it all during my career as a realtor. From the unprecedented boom when I first got licensed in 2002, to the nationwide bust from 2005 to 2008, to the current post Pandemic market and highest interest rates from many years of an unprecedented, artificially, low average of a 3% market to now over 6% – which by the way is the past 30-year national average rate

The current market has too many potential buyers than there are homes for sale because higher interest rates have meant lower sales prices of homes. Up until 2022, the results often created a feverish, panic-driven buying environment consisting of multiple offers and bidding wars for those trying to purchase homes before loan mortgage rates rise or before they lose their once very secure federal government jobs.

Statistically and traditionally, Washington’s a real estate market has even influenced politics, with Republicans buying homes and Democrats renting. But in these turbulent times, the reverse has happened during the past decade with the two parties where the Obama’s purchased their 8200 sq. ft. Kalorama mansion for $8 Million, in the priciest of DC neighborhoods.

And then Ivanka Trump’s rental (previously before she and her husband Jared Kushner left town in January of 2021) was a rumored rental of a 6,870 sq. ft. $5.5 million home or a cool $15,000 a month for their four years during her father’s administration.

Additionally, real estate purchases by either party are at an all-time low and attributed to the lack of socialization and cordiality among party members. Because, once upon a time congress men and women lived in the same Capitol Hill neighborhood and therefore got to know each other socially and therefore generated a more cordial, communicative, collaborative Congressional atmosphere verses our now dysfunctional, recalcitrant, obstructionist, “do-nothing”, atmosphere.

So, how did I accidently end up in a job I once swore I would never do? Let us back up a bit. Throughout my various careers, I found myself often relating to people like the main protagonist – a travel writer who hates to travel — of Anne Tyler’s book The Accidental Tourist. Tyler is the prolific New York Times bestseller from Baltimore. Adapted for the screen, William Hurt starred as the dour, unhappy, socially anorexic travel writer.

Like William Hurt, I also got into this career quite by accident, hence, the title of this series, “The Accidental Realtor”. I too, at times, more than I’d like to recount have on the same day of a great settlement, simultaneously loved – and then lost a multi- million dollar listing to a competitor, of which there are way too many (1,564,557 nationwide) and (3,500 in DC alone) – then hated my profession as a realtor.

If I extend the literary metaphor, my real estate career has been at times like a fascinating feature film or at the very least an interesting short feast of a story, sometimes delicious, sometimes nauseating, occasionally nourishing and yes at times satisfying. I mean if I had to be in sales, real estate is the one profession holding the most financially rewarding potential.

Interestingly, only a very small percentage of people going into sales ever plan to get into such a financially precarious, 100% commission, do or die career like real estate sales. Instead, it’s usually an act of desperation.

Surveys of professionals such as doctors, have shown that 95% claim they knew from childhood or at least high school, that they wanted to be doctors. Fifty percent of teachers indicate that they always wanted to be teachers. The corresponding number of realtors is only about 5%.

Other than motivation and real estate market conditions, there are other challenges to being a realtor, such as the IRS. The nature of the real estate industry is such that agents often have numerous business expenses which are legitimately tax deductions. The IRS hates these and I became one of their targets when I was hit with a Tax Audit in 2006 for my 2005 return, only a few short years into my career as a realtor, not only making more than I had ever made before in my life and therefore taking more business expenses, tripping the IRS warning monitors that something was very, very different about my earnings.

The end result – was a letter from the IRS and my accountant, who had gently guided me through the terrifying process – that he claimed was unprecedented. And once we proved my business expenses were in fact, a fact, they retreated, saying basically, “You don’t owe us and we don’t owe you, have a nice life.”

PART 2:

So, I have swung with the ever changing extremely profitable for “seller’s market” to the extremely favorable “buyer’s market”. As I already mentioned, my serious consideration about changing my career started in 2001 during what is often referred to as the “Tech Wreck”, when the big technological bust occurred.

I had been working for a few years on a variety of lucrative marketing and communications projects with companies like the Computer Science Corporation (CSC) and the Fannie Mae Foundation, traveling Monday through Friday to exciting places like Hartford, Connecticut and Fairfax, Virginia and then staying put locally in DC, when all those jobs dried up, resulting in no projects, no work, no income, none, nada.

Desperate for work and considering dusting off my Masters-Degree and getting licensed as a therapist – or finishing up that doctoral program that I had started then abruptly ended years ago – both of which I determined would have taken way too much time and money (money I didn’t have) and I needed immediate income right away!

At the same time, a new real estate agent friend in Baltimore suggested I follow in her footsteps. “Get into real estate you’ll have time to do other things!” she proclaimed, a proclamation I later learned was a well-intentioned lie.

But then I thought hmmm, I could begin refilling the coffers and write, which I’d always known was my true calling, and not have to endure being under the supervision of some tyrannical boss, and thought, this might work. Just as quickly, I decided that “I will NEVER become a REALTOR!

A year later I was the proud holder of not one, not two, but three real estate licenses – the second one in our Nation’s Capital because it was the most expensive real estate in the area and then Maryland last and my first in Northern Virginia because I thought mistakenly that was where I was going to land, and well it was the tri-state area and I wanted to maximize my financial footprint.

So like most in my profession I became a Realtor “accidentally”. And twenty years later I still struggle with it. It is by far and away not only the most difficult, most harrowing and vexing career ladder I’ve ever simultaneously climbed and then fallen from but also the most lucrative, exciting, entertaining, and sometimes thrilling career I could have ever chosen.

I have also endured the heartache and heartbreak of the times when a friend or family member chooses NOT to use me as their realtor and or even allow me the chance to connect with the realtor they have chosen and receive a referral fee if it’s out of my licensed area.

At these times when they claim things like, “Well I don’t want to mix personal with professional or money matters.” My standard response is, “So you’d rather trust a stranger with the most important purchase and or sale of your life?”

And as far as the writing? Well, I’m still trying hence this meager effort and as my real estate coach says, “A realtor freaking out because a transaction has gotten stressful is like a surgeon freaking out at the sign of blood.” So I power onward, upward, downward, sideways still riding the great real estate tsunami without completely being consumed by the undertow.

Then there is my own ancestral relationship and history with real estate purchases and investments. Why and how I got into real estate is only part of my story.

I blame it also on the fact that I had spent the first two years of my life on the top floor apartment of a historic row house in Baltimore City, on the 300 block of E. Lafayette Street. It was one of the twelve row homes my grandmother, Marie Ashton 6 Poligano Hall and her sister had inherited from my great grandfather, Pedro Poligano from Palermo, Italy. So, I often think that I inherited their real estate karma if you believe in that kind of thing.

I think it’s also why upon my return to the DC, Maryland, Virginia (DMV) region, I wisely invested in first the 2004 Baltimore real estate market and historic Federal Hill, buying a 100-year-old brick Federal row home and then selling it a year later in 2005 for a $75,000 profit.

Then in 2005, I made my best real estate investment to-date, a 100-year-old historic Victorian brick townhouse on another hill, Capitol Hill, DC NE near the now booming, millennial and hipster popular H ST Corridor, NOMA or Atlas District.

My friend Kathy, who had first suggested real estate sales as a career opportunity for me, was living in historic Federal Hill in South Baltimore and had continued to thrive off of a healthy real estate diet. Despite her career advice, we remained friends.

The year before moving to DC I had fallen in love with my newfound Dickensian- like neighborhood of Federal Hill in my hometown of Baltimore. I had decided to sell my loft in the hip, new cool area of Midtown Atlanta three years prior, in the Hastings Seed Factory building. It was my last attempt to reinvent the town I had called home for the previous 15 years.

Then, after discovering that the incoming daily 18-wheelers from I-85 onto my little two-lane Marietta Street, down from CNN Center and their thunderous roar shook my loft-condo to the point of awaking in the middle of an earth quake every morning.

Atlanta, and my new condo, had both become, uninhabitable for me. So after six months of enduring my new loft in old Atlanta, I rented it out to two men from Kansas City and their dog, neither of whom were bothered by the noise, and high-tailed it home to Baltimore.

But back to Kathy. Taking her own career advice, Kathy had done well. She had received her real estate license in 1997 and went from living broke on a meager flight attendant’s salary and in a rented flat of a rundown row house in Federal Hill, to owning three homes, all of which she had nicely renovated and rented out two and lived in one.

And at final count had accumulated about seven homes, most of which she sold right before the market crashed. Kathy had found her calling, like Scarlett, in land. “There’s nonthin’ like land…” or in this case historic Federal Hill row houses. And based on Kathy’s real estate success, I then decided I’d give it a try.

While I have not accumulated multiple houses like my great grandfather or my grandmother or as my friend Kathy, who remains one of the top 10 agents in the Baltimore area, I do still own that great investment or two-unit home on Capitol Hill NE where I have resided for the past eighteen years. A record stay in my adult life as I’ve been a bit of a gypsy.

And I continue to write, channeling all of this sometimes-manic sales energy into my more creative, authentic self. So at the behest of my friends and family and colleagues, who I have regaled over the years with a myriad of wild real estate stories, much to their amusement. I thought I would share some of my more eccentric client stories, protecting their anonymity of course, with the general public at large.

So here goes and welcome to my life as “The Accidental Realtor”.