| About Me: | Never in my wildest dreams did I guess I would end up selling real estate in Nanaimo, BC... but here I am and it has been great.
My pre-real estate career was 10 years spent in the food and beverage service industry. It started in a little coffee shop in Sackville, NB while I was getting my degree at Mount Allison University. My game plan for making enough money to support myself through school was a simple one "Never say no to a job." During the school year I worked as a lifeguard, I cleaned houses, I stuffed envelopes, I did tastings in liquor stores, I did research... I said yes to all paying jobs and extra shifts but the one I loved was the coffee shop.
That first coffee shop job led to others in cafes, restaurants and pubs in Kelowna, Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Dublin, Halifax and right here in Nanaimo. I loved this industry - the fast pace, the front-of-house/back-of-house divide, the ritual of coffee and the simple, timeless act of people coming together to share food and enjoy each other's company. Being a part of the team of people it takes for a place to run smoothly on a packed night is a great feeling.
In 2006 I realized a long-time dream of mine, I opened my own little coffee business. Harbour Star Coffee Co. was a mobile little cafe I ran down on the Nanaimo seawall for 3 summers. In a funny way, this business venture in a completely different industry is what led to my current career in real estate. The next logical step with the coffee biz seemed to be to set-up somewhere I could run year-round (namely indoors) but I felt strongly that if I was going to do that, I wanted to own the building I was operating in. The more I thought about it, the more the real estate side of the next step excited me. I figured that since it had been possible for me to buy one property already why not another? I decided that if I was going to get more serious about real estate investing, why not know what the real estate agents know? Why not understand the market by working in it? I did one last summer of the coffee business and then joined RE/MAX in 2008.
Getting my license the week the markets crashed (yikes!) proved to have a silver lining. Those first few months, where each headline was worse than the next, helped give a clear picture of what is really involved in being a successful real estate agent and encouraged me to focus on the local reality instead of getting caught up in the stories coming out of the States and other parts of Canada. I see my role as being the local real estate expert on my clients' team. I believe strongly that Nanaimo is a great place to invest and I focus my energy on knowing the local market, the listings, the trends and the statistics in order to provide my clients with the information they need to make the best real estate decisions for themselves. I love what I do.
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of Nanaimo, #1-5140 Metral Drive, V9T 2K8
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