My father and my brother were in the clothing business.

Streetwear, Streetforce, Jezebel, and a menswear label called Haight & Ashbury. I worked alongside them for more than ten years.

Haight & Ashbury wasn't sold as clothing. It was sold as an attitude — a man comfortable in his own skin, whatever age he happened to be. That is a strange thing to learn young: you are never really selling the object. I have never had to unlearn it.

I started in real estate in 1991, at my oldest brother Meb's brokerage, RE/MAX MVP. I was a single mother with two small children, Adam and Hannah, and I needed work that would let me raise them without putting a ceiling on what I could earn. From 1997 I spent a decade in the United States, buying, renovating and reselling houses as an investor. I was not licensed there; that work was my own.

Both of them are gone now, my father and Meb. I am the one still doing this.

When I came back to Canada and joined Realtron I didn't take clients. I took the Branch Administrator job first — compliance, trust accounting, transaction processing, and all the specific ways a file goes wrong.

It is the least glamorous room in a brokerage and most agents never set foot in it. I wanted to know how the thing actually worked before I sold anything through it. That decision is the reason I could open my own brokerage nine years later instead of just wanting to.

The practice I built came almost entirely from referral. Some of those clients are still with me twenty years on. There are families I have now sold to twice, the second time to the children.

What people write about afterwards is never the house. It is a divorce, or a death, or thirty years in one place, or a first purchase made alone by someone who never expected to be doing it alone. Most of that work is holding your nerve on somebody else's behalf.

In February 2017 I put my name on a brokerage. Broker of Record is not a title, it is a licence class: the regulator held me personally responsible for the trust account, for compliance, and for the conduct of everyone working under me. For nine years there was nobody above me to escalate to.

I did it alongside a fabulous team of support from RE/MAX Realtron, who looked after the day-to-day of the trust accounts, the compliance and the conduct. The responsibility was still mine, and I would not have wanted it any other way, but I never pretended I carried it without them.

When the franchise renewal came round in 2026 I decided not to commit to another five years, because I am going to Florida. I went back to RE/MAX Realtron Realty as a Broker, which keeps me working in the business while I make the move.

I have done every job in this business, most of them at the same time. I would like to do fewer of them, better, with people around me.