Donning the tight suit, tie cutting off circulation, and fake smiles – there’s definitely a stereotype when it comes to real estate agents.
I couldn’t possibly fit in that mold. My life has never fit a typical mold.
With all the constant changes (for better or worse), I’ve learned to roll with the punches.
In my early 20’s, I’d cried to my father, fearing that I’d never make anything above the bare minimum in my career. Staring me down, my father gave a piece of advice that stuck with me for the rest of my life — You don’t know what life has ahead for you. I really took that advice to heart.
I decided that I needed a real education (I dropped out of school at 15, left home at 16). At 22 I enrolled into a community college and then made it into a university. In my final semester of college, I found out I was going to have my first child. My son was born in the summer of 2000 and the tech bubble had just popped. I was a casualty of the bust.
The pittance of the severance pay would barely last me a month. To add injury to insult, my son was born with a failing liver and had 3 liver surgeries and 2 transplants by the time he was 1. Broke and busted I moved back into my childhood bedroom at 26 years old. Humiliating to say the least, but that’s what the bottom always feels like.
One of my dad’s friends suggested that I get my real estate license and help him rent out some of his vacant apartment units. It turned out I was really good at this. After a few years and finally having a small bit of money, I decided to leave Florida and buy a farm in Asheville, NC where I would farm vegetables and raise livestock.
After some time, I had created the largest shiitake farm in NC. But the small park I bought would end up being one of the harder challenges I had yet to complete and would take me nearly a decade to get it right. By this time, it was 2010 and we were barely coming out of the great recession and I was again broke as a joke.
Again, I sought the advice of my father.
He told me to grow up, quit bitching about life not being fair and do what I had to do to make something of myself. I was 35. It would take a few more years and a lot more pain before I would finally accept that I was in fact on the wrong track. I drove down to Atlanta, bought a suit, got a haircut, shaved my beard and gave my best interview of my life to the then manager at the Atlanta office for Marcus & Millichap. It worked. They agreed to give me a shot, but I would have to move to Atlanta. This was a 100% commission job, no salary or expense reimbursements.
It was up to me to make this work. I couldn’t afford to live near my new office so I would drive 1.5 hours each way every day.
I relentlessly battled my despair.
I would not give up.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
And it’s even harder to be successful at it. It was the lack of quality educational resources on commercial grade land lease communities that inspired me to write my first book, The Mobile Home Park Manifesto.
The Mobile Home Park Manifesto is an easy to read, fast-track primer on how to invest ethically and maximize profitability.
With my background of over 20 years in the industry including closing 400+ transactions, I wanted to teach people how to avoid all the financial pitfalls I’d made so many times early on in my own career. After the success of the book (we were ranked #1 in the real estate category on Amazon for 6 months!), I started receiving multiple requests for more in-depth training. Readers were looking to take a deeper dive into the topics we discussed in the book.
It’ll fast track the learning curve in a way that’s easy to understand and let’s you go at your own pace.
If you’re already a park veteran and looking for a broker, rest assured -you’ll be working with the best of the best. The Esterson MHC team has sold 100s of millions of dollars worth of parks since January of 2020. We’ll help you sell your park or buy your next park with the best comprehensive data in the industry, including full portfolio tracking of over 380 portfolios nationally.
Not to mention we have the highest client satisfaction of any other MHP brokers in the country.
I’m fortunate enough to be able to make a living in one of the hottest industries around today. But my true passion lies with helping others succeed.
… I speak at several conferences each year offering free or low cost workshops
… My team offers free deal evaluations to anyone who requests it
… If you’re not 100% satisfied with any of my products or services, you get your money back. No questions asked.
If you want to see what we’re up to right now or learn more about my current projects, follow me on LinkedIn or Facebook.
There’s one thing I can guarantee you about working with me, “I will persist until I succeed.”
From looking at where I was to where I am now –
I’m pretty good at persisting.
