Sandy Ferrera:

I made a very good living doing traditional real estate. I was the sole bread winner for my family and I walked away from a very, very lucrative career. The problem was the business calls for a lot of evenings and weekends and I had two small boys and that wasn’t going to work for me. I mean my time with my children is paramount. I had one individual that wanted me to show them houses on Christmas day. They were from the United Kingdom, I get it, they were here on holiday and they wanted to buy a place on the beach, but I was on holiday with my children. That aspect of real estate was not appealing to me. The fact that I didn’t control my own money was not appealing to me.

Back then I had $16,000 on the books, which doesn’t seem like much now, but for me it was a lot of money, and they were solid deals. One guy quit his job two days before closing. One pool was two inches in the easement. How do you move a pool two inches? And then the other one just fell apart, I don’t even remember why. And so when I lost those $16,000 in commissions it was tough because that’s how I made my livelihood.

And so I think that the property management really appealed to me because it was a steady income, I mean I could create a budget, I knew exactly how much money I had coming in, I knew exactly what I had going out the door. I could create my own hours, I was home at night to tuck the kids in. I wasn’t running out showing houses on the weekends. And even back then when I carried a pager 24 hours a day an emergency consisted of me picking up the phone and arranging for a vendor. I didn’t have to physically go out to the property.

So money was important, stability was important, but my time with my family was extremely important. And I think that when you put all those things together it’s what allowed me to walk away from a six-figure income.