Is Everyone Just Going Into Real Estate?

This is an excerpt from Sari Botton’s new memoir, And You May Find Yourself…Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. She also publishes Oldster Magazine.

In the summer of 2013, my Gmail was hacked. Every single person on my contacts list received a note from me announcing I’d become a ReMax real estate agent. It was  a convincing facsimile, complete with the red, white, and blue ReMax parachute logo. “Click here to view listings!” it lied, luring recipients instead to a link that ensured they themselves would contract the email virus, then unwittingly pass it on to others.

Cue the succession of annoying replies: random contacts admonishing me to change my password; otherwise intelligent people duped by the scheme, believing it was really me.

“Don’t you think you should at least ask me how I’ve been before you start sending me real estate listings?” wrote someone I’d briefly flirted with more than a dozen years before.

“Wow, small world!” gushed a new acquaintance in earnest. “I just got my real estate license, too!”

Emails like those irked me most. They were cruel reminders that media was in such a state of free-fall, it seemed plausible that I might have given up on writing and started selling houses instead. Those notes also reignited an uncomfortable long-standing internal debate over whether the taxing, suboptimal, mercenary work I’ve juggled for decades under the banner of “freelance writing” — writing an article or essay here and there, but much more ghostwriting of other people’s books, slinging ad copy, plus editing and teaching — has actually hindered my progress toward becoming a different kind of writer, the kind I’ve always wanted to be, of memoir and fiction. It’s a question I still ask myself almost daily: Would I be more successful with my personal writing by now, at 56, if my day job were in a completely unrelated field?

Some of my colleagues seem to believe that’s the way to go. In recent years I’ve been hearing about writers in my Gen X demographic taking jobs in real estate, one of the more flexible, potentially decently paying occupations that, say, a middle-aged writer can qualify for with relatively little prior training. First it was the former bureau chief of an NPR affiliate station. Next, a colleague from a magazine I once worked at. At the time my email was hacked in 2013, the most notable writer to add “realtor” to her resume was Maggie Estep — a slam poetry icon of the 1990s, and author of seven critically acclaimed novels, whom I admired. 

Maggie wrote on her popular blog about having difficulty supporting herself in the crumbling publishing economy, where book advances and fees for writing assignments were steadily plummeting  —  where being a “freelance writer,” as I’ve been for over two decades, had become a ridiculous proposition for everyone but the independently wealthy.

“The writing biz has changed and my income from it is modest,” she wrote. “Being broke isn’t very interesting anymore.” Teaching yoga, her first sideline, hadn’t turned out to be an effective means of financial support either. “So I’m going to real estate school.”

I didn’t know Maggie well at all. I was just beginning to get to know her when, in February, 2014, she had a sudden heart attack and left this world too soon. In the ’90s, I’d idolized her. She was this cool, sexy, punk rock feminist poet and spoken word star with an acid wit.

After her death, I started reading her blog. In her final months, Maggie wrote there about her new profession. It was unnerving for me to learn that this accomplished writer and performer who’d once been able to earn at least a good portion of her living — sometimes all of it — from her creative output was no longer able to do so; that she was now becoming a real estate agent for real.

I mean no disrespect to real estate agents. They work hard in what is a demanding field. I’ve heard the few I’m acquainted with talk about having to frequently update their licenses with more classes and certification. I’ve also heard them gripe about squiring some of their clients around from home to home (to home to home) for months on end without it ever yielding a sale, all while working solely on commission.

But the field also has some notorious image problems. Like sales people in certain other fields, some realtors are perceived as hucksters — deceptively ameliorating less desirable listings with euphemisms like “cozy” for small, and “convenient to everything” often meaning right on the highway; using bait-and-switch advertising; or luring unwitting investors into problematic (or non-existent) developments, Glengarry Glen Ross style.

Those image problems weren’t lost on Maggie. At her memorial, Steve Buscemi read aloud an email she’d sent him letting him know about her new profession, and asking for buyer and seller referrals. “A lot of realtors are kind of creepy,” she wrote, “so I guess my angle is that I’m the non-creepy realtor.”

After she died, a close friend of Maggie’s told me that in ways, real estate seemed like a perfect fit for her — that she had been given to regularly poring over listings and looking at properties just for fun, often trying to match friends with the perfect homes for them. But scrolling through her blog, it becomes evident that she had pretty mixed feelings about real estate as a job. 

She lamented no longer having the luxury of writing all day, at home: “I’m having to learn to do what thousands and thousands of people do in this world: Snatch tiny windows of writing time when I can and where I can.”

Sometimes, it sounded as if she were trying to convince herself that taking a day job as a realtor was okay, a move that could possibly help her writing, maybe leading her to clients who’d inspire fictional characters.

She sounded resigned to making peace with her new circumstances: “For me, selling real estate in an honest way while writing books I care about is a good path. My next adventure.”

And it seems as if, for the brief time she worked in the Halstead office in Hudson before passing away, Maggie did manage to also focus on her writing. Which is more than I can say for myself, with all the writing-related work I do for a living. Even at times when I’ve lucked into short-term, undemanding, higher-paying dream gigs I’ve found that working with words all day, whether at home or in a proper office,  doesn’t afford me the time or headspace for the writing I really want to do. 

Despite this awareness, and publishing’s steadily diminishing returns, I find myself obstinately resistant to the idea of giving up and finding a different kind of day job. For one thing, I am short on other marketable skills. But more than that, I’m too spoiled by years of making my own schedule and working from home to embrace showing up at an office, and at the times someone else tells me to be there — a boss. The irony is that I’m kind of lonely at home, and with no boundaries between my living and work spaces, I am never not working. What’s more, as a freelancer, I answer to roughly nine bosses at any given time.

The biggest obstacle to other forms of gainful employment, though, is probably my misguided, stubborn pride in telling people I’m a writer. The validation of my title still makes me feel accomplished. What’s more, I’ve accrued seniority here, something I’m too old to accrue in any other field at this point. The ladder might be collapsing — some might argue it already has — but I’m still holding onto my rung for dear life.

Do not attempt to strip me of the false senses of success and security that I cling to, (let it be noted for the record: I’ve never made much money in my field). Because if I quit freelancing and become a real estate agent — or lab technician, waitperson, barista, cashier, nutritional counselor, whatever — and I still fail to produce and succeed with my “real” writing, then what (and whom) do I have left to blame?

I suppose then I’d find out just how much I want to write. Maybe I’d find that the psychically draining nature of my gainful employment as a writer/editor/teacher is merely an excuse; that what’s largely stopping me from succeeding as a writer-writer are fear and procrastination.

Just two weeks before she died, Maggie wrote about her own tendency to procrastinate. As if there were time for that. I’m now quite certain there isn’t.