The NEST SoCal GROUP: Realtor loving the Long Beach community
What first brought you here to Long Beach, and more importantly, what keeps you here?
My wife, Kelly, and I moved into the Cal Heights area of Long Beach in 2021 after purchasing our first home together. We were blending families with 4 kids between us (ages 18, 15, 13 and 4) and 4 dogs on top of that! We have both been residents in Long Beach in other areas over the past 25 years, and most recently, I had became a transplant from Orange County. We’ve both sold many homes within the Cal Heights and Bixby Knolls area, and were drawn to buy in Cal Heights because of the character of the homes and the sense of connection that is so woven into the community.
What do you think surprises people most about Long Beach and the surrounding area?
There was no question that we would live in Long Beach because we are intimately aware of how special this City is. We love Long Beach for the diversity it offers both architecturally as well as culturally with a robust metropolitan area, historic areas, museums, churches, and a tone of acceptance and tolerance for many diverse groups.
Self-care is a must have for busy entrepreneurs; what are your hobbies and how do they help you reset?
Being an entrepreneur and a mom is always a balancing act, and one neither of us can manage successfully without taking some time to recharge and dedicate to ourselves. I am an avid runner, which I regularly refer to as my form of therapy, and Kelly is a road biker, so both hobbies help us to have an outlet and get us out into nature and alone to process our thoughts and feelings regularly and in a healthy way.
As a parent, what was your experience harmonizing motherhood while discovering your current passion as a realtor? What first drew you to real estate? Was it a career move that you ended up falling in love with, or did you love real estate and decided to make a career of it?
For me personally, my path into real estate was an inadvertent discovery of love when I was trying to buy my first home 20+ years ago. I was paying attention to everything our Realtor was doing and thought I might enjoy doing real estate on the side of my corporate gig so I signed up for a class with her Century 21 office at her urging and fell in love with it. I love the intricacies of the whole process and how interconnected so many people have to be to make a home sale come together successfully. Navigating the marketing, the negotiations, and the transactional aspect of the sale, are all parts of a puzzle that can come together perfectly with the right realtor at the helm, and I love helping people build generational wealth in the process! As far as harmonizing motherhood while working full time in real estate, part of the reason I went full time into sales was my ignorance in thinking I could have really flexible hours as a Realtor when I was pregnant with my first child, but I quickly learned that full time sales on 100% commission income, means a LOT of hours and really complex work. It felt anything but harmonic for the first several years, but I’ve learned to schedule my time with my family’s activities first and then infill consistent hours for marketing and meeting with clients and communicating those hours effectively so that I set the right expectations from the beginning.
We often hear that the fastest way to build personal wealth is to buy a home. What arethe top 3 tips that you’d give to help someone make the leap from renting to purchasing a home?
#1 – Manage your expectations…you are not likely going to buy your dream house on the first go around. Getting into the real estate market with the purchase of a condo or a duplex where you can live in one unit and rent the other out to help cover your mortgage can be a great stepping stone toward leveraging that property in the future. #2 – Prioritize your criteria and prepare that you may have to sacrifice some of your “wants” for your “needs” when you buy your first home. You might prioritize an area or school district as the one you want to raise your family in, and in the process, that may mean you buy a smaller house that will be tight for a while or one that you might have to update and make improvements to rather than one that is move-in ready. #3 – Meet with an experienced Realtor and Lender who can help you determine what you qualify for with your current credit and income profile, and then determine if you need resources for credit repair or more savings to be sure you are going to be able to get a good loan at a good interest rate for long term success. You can set up a budget to automatically set aside money every paycheck or every month into a down payment savings account with a plan in place as to how many months it may take to either be ready financially, and/or which debts you may need to chip away at before you should buy.
For families looking to purchase a second home as a long-term investment opportunity, would you recommend a vacation home for personal and short-term rental use, or a long-term rental?
That is really a question of tolerance and resources. A vacation home that you plan to use personally and rent out through popular outlets like Airbnb, VRBO, etc can be a great investment if you buy in an area where you can plan to rent it out enough during peak use times/seasonally to offset the costs you have over the course of a whole year, and that will mean you will be able to use it less during the peak season yourself. Plus the management of a vacation rental can be a full time job, so you will need a local resource to deal with the revolving door of renters and the move-in/move-out cleaning, repairs for damage, and generally higher wear and tear a short term rental will bring. If you budget for these things, then great, but don’t let these factors catch you off guard as they can be incredibly expensive. A more conservative investment is in long term rental units, preferably 2 – 4 units so that you at least may be able to offset costs with income still coming from the other unit(s) when one unit goes vacant for any period of time. There is typically less turnover, less wear and tear, and less maintenance cost overall with long term rental units.
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