How I got here.

Before real estate, I was at the Boys & Girls Club running silent auctions and galas. Not on the back end — running them. Building the room, designing the flow, working donors. I was good at it without realizing what I was actually good at. I knew how to put people together, get them excited about something they believed in, and ask them for money without making it weird. That's marketing. That's negotiation. I just hadn't connected it to a career yet.

At one of those galas, a woman came up to me afterward and said, plainly, "You should be in real estate. You're already doing the hard part." My wife had been telling me the same thing for over a year. I'd been ignoring her — not because I disagreed, but because the leap felt too big and the path wasn't clear. Hearing it from a stranger that night was the kick. The next morning I started looking up real estate classes.

My first mentor took me for a ride. He got 25 to 30 percent of every commission I made — off the top, before splits — and taught me almost nothing in return. No leads. No introductions. No time, no scripts, no shadowing. The percentage came out because the contract said it could.

That first year I closed two deals. I made just enough money to remember rent was due and not much else. I learned a real lesson though — one I now make sure no new agent who works with me has to learn the same way: the words "mentor" and "manager" are not the same. A mentor pours into you. A manager just takes a cut.

Year two I found a real team. Mentors who actually mentored. They put me in listing presentations and let me watch how they handled objections in real time. They walked me through their CMAs line by line. They gave me their scripts and then made me throw them out and write my own. They taught me how to read a buyer's body language during a tour, how to time a counter-offer, how to keep a deal together when an appraisal comes in low.

Two deals in year one became sixteen in year two. Twenty-eight in year three. By year five I was hitting fifty a year, which is more than most agents close in their entire career. Volume wasn't the point — the volume was just a byproduct of finally doing the work the right way, with the right people in my corner.

Eleven years in, I've closed hundreds of transactions across five Southern California markets. The math has changed but the work hasn't. Every transaction still gets the same thing — me, my full attention, every step.

Real estate is not a complicated industry. It's a relationship industry that pretends to be technical so agents can justify high fees and bad service. The contracts have an answer for almost everything. The pricing data is public. The marketing channels are the same ones every business uses. What's rare — what actually matters — is the agent who pours themselves into your specific deal because they care how it ends up.

That's what I try to be for every client. The 1% commission listing I built is a direct expression of that — same service, lower fee, because the legacy commission model was built around brokerage office overhead that doesn't exist anymore at LPT. The bilingual service is part of it — Spanish-speaking families in my markets deserve the same level of representation as English-speaking ones, period. The fast responses, the honest pricing, the texts at 9pm when a deal is mid-escrow — that's all part of it.

Eleven years has taught me to slow down where it counts and move fast where it doesn't. To tell sellers what they need to hear about their home, not what they want to hear. To walk buyers away from the wrong house even when they've fallen for it. To show up the same way for a first-time buyer in Alhambra as I do for a second-home buyer in Palm Springs.