Why Do I Specialize in Rural Properties?

A question about my Facebook profile image – where I’m posing wearing my Grandma’s Eddie Bauer insulated vest & holding a .223 Ruger American rifle – gave way to an important revelation recently.

I was asked on a Facebook Group Post: “Why would you want to cut anybody out as a potential buyer? Seems to me that you are reducing the market for your services unnecessarily.

People who don’t own guns buy properties as well.

You showed up on my feed because I have an interest in horse properties. Again I am sorry, but I saw that and just had to ask the question. You may be showing up on other feeds of people who are interested in what you’re doing but possibly turned off by the need to post with a rifle. Is it necessary? 

I don’t need a realtor who is a crack shot, I need one to find me a great deal. Just wondered if you thought about this marketing wise?

To which I replied: I have thought about it, and you raise a provocative question I’m glad to have been asked; I’ve been a licensed real estate broker since 2006 and have operated my own California firm since 2012 and I still operate my own brokerage. Coming into the industry (just as it was starting to tank) and being a young entrepreneur, I found myself catering to every whim of my clients – if they wanted me to be available on weekends, I was, able to work paperlessly, I did, wanted everything on paper, I obliged, didn’t believe I was old enough, I told them about my experience, didn’t think I had enough education, I pursued a college degree — I was spending so much time trying to be everything to everyone else I had no opportunity to be me and I didn’t have a close connection or much common ground with my clients.

A few years back I moved to Washington & decided starting a real estate career all over in a new part of the country was too hard & I didn’t want to do it. After realizing I’m a terrible employee because I’d been self-employed the vast majority of my working life, I started thinking about what I wanted from my career besides a paycheck. I asked myself over a series of several months, “What’s important?” “What do I enjoy?” “What values to I want to instill in my children?” And I came to the conclusion that one of my favorite things is working in my garden and spending time with my grandparents on their ranch, branding cattle, mucking the stalls, shearing the sheep & slopping the pigs, collecting the eggs from the chicken coop each morning, and with all the concern for electronics eroding our interpersonal connections and distracting us from the “more important things in life” I realized I’d be happiest working exclusively with outdoorsmen and women, in the field, in the forests, on the lake or along the creek. I like being outdoors hiking and bird watching, hunting and fishing. My kids enjoy it, my husband enjoys it, and when we’re out camping together, beyond cell phone range, we bond and we get to know each other and we build friendships with people we didn’t know until we met on a trail or at a ‘secret’ fishing hole.

I don’t want to show 10 homes a day, honestly, after 4 they all blend together anyway. My people are outdoorspeople – we hunt, we fish, we camp and hike, we come together for conservation and to work together; we support each other & love each other, and we find that basic human connection – something that isn’t reflected in our jobs or our work clothes or the car we drive or the tone of our skin or our spouse’s gender – something that we recognize in each other’s smiles and common happy memories. My people are those that realize when the whole world goes to hell, the folks with skills to raise crops and animals, recognize edible wild plants and know how to keep our water supplies clean will be the most important no matter how they were treated or regarded in “modern” society. My people, despite it being a stereotype, are the ‘salt of the earth’ folks who will help their neighbor when their car breaks down, will fix them a hot dish when they’ve lost a loved one, will volunteer to mend a fence or raise a barn when it’s needed, and have a passion for the outdoors. That’s what my rifle in my portrait represents. It’s the first gun I ever owned, the one my grandpa bought for me. The same grandpa that sold all his cattle in the early 2000s when my grandma’s dementia made her unable to help tend them any longer; my grandpa who taught me to shoot that rifle on the range he set up when the cows were all gone for the first time in 100+ years because he couldn’t stand the land ‘going to waste without anyone using it’; the man who served in the Air Force during the Korean War, came back and married a woman he met on the phone when her friend didn’t respond to the call; a member of several sheriff’s possies, a man who raised three boys & moved to the middle of nowhere & started raising cattle as part of his fourth career because he just didn’t understand the word ‘retire’, the man who every time a woman was in the news after being assaulted or murdered called me to make sure I’d cleaned my gun after my last trip to the range & was going to teach me how to reload my own ammunition some day. He helped neighbors, co-workers, and strangers any time he could. He called on his fellow parishioners from the church for help raising his barn when the old one collapsed under the snow. He hunted and then prayed over the meal featuring venison. He thanked the All Mighty for the blessings bestowed including the land, the harvest, the game, and the family around the table. Like me, he hunted, hiked, fished, camped, boated, and loved the outdoors. He taught me I couldn’t be everything to everyone; that I shouldn’t try to be something I wasn’t – that if I was happiest outdoors that’s where I should work, if I enjoyed going to the range & shooting or on the lake fishing, or into the buck brush to hunt, I shouldn’t hide it and I should look for other people I had this in common with. He was a very wise man and he was right. I’ve made amazing friends, grown so much closer to family members I wasn’t close with growing up, and found a lot of happiness and fulfillment being honest about the things I’m passionate about and finding others who are too.

Hope this answers the whole marketing question about me posing with a gun.

My cheeky answer would have been: anyone who owns large, rural land (the kind of property I specialize in!) and is anti-gun won’t be after they camp their property for the night!