I’m a Realtor® with Samson Properties in Chantilly, VA. Since you landed here, I am sure that my domain name was a pretty big clue, but there are also strong hints on my Google+ profile.
Before moving to the Northern Virginia area in the late 90′s, I was the marketing manager for a technology distribution company in chilly New England. I think it’s an unrelated coincidence that following my departure, 3 of the 4 all 4 of the Boston sports teams won championships. (It took the Bruins a little more time, but they got it done in 2011!) I left the cold weather behind and came to invest in real estate and build custom homes. That didn’t surprise me because real estate has always been connected to two dominant themes in my life: my creative side and the enjoyment I get from working with people. Home building was just a great opportunity to express my creative energies. To that end I became a licensed Class A contractor and spent the next decade having a great time fretting over those pesky design details.
Samples of some of my work appear nearby. I’ve built big homes – some over 12,000 square feet – and smaller ones, but my focus has always been the same: to create a consistent design full of livable space. As a long-time interior design junkie, it’s been fun to be able to dream up an idea and create a home, one of the focal points of a family’s life. My experiences over the last decade buying & selling and working with home buyers provided me with a strong foundation in local property values.
As much as I love the creative opportunities in home building, I also really enjoy working with people as opposed to things. That found its expression in marketing. While I was building homes, in late 1999 I helped launch an Internet real estate site devoted to applying contact circle marketing techniques to real estate. Big features of the site were tracking results and quickly providing prospective buyer feedback to everyone involved in the process, from real estate agents to sellers. That reflected the importance I place on quickly capturing and learning from this vital information. The marketing principles behind the site were good then, and the deployment of broadband and email utilization have just made them better over time. There are a number of new web sites that are built on these contact circle marketing techniques, which brings a smile to my face because it validates the techniques I worked hard to develop. Unfortunately, the bursting of the Internet bubble made it hard to finance continued development at the time, so our team closed the site.
To build on my interest in real estate marketing, I became a real estate agent and spent several years at Long & Foster’s McLean Sales Office before I joined the great team at Samson Properties in Chantilly, VA. So I guess you could say I’m still blending what I enjoy, being creative and working with people in real estate. After all, it’s what I love.
But I’m not all work and no play. I’ve had a lifelong interest in illustration and spend time illustrating the crazy moments of my life that happen every now and then. I live in Great Falls and love the outdoors, so it’s no surprise that I spend a lot of time running and biking at Great Falls Park. I also spend a fair amount of time there just walking my two Norfolk Terriers, Hank & Otto. They’d rather bark at bikes than ride them, and only 1 of them really likes to run as fast as I do.
Blogging has awakened an interest I never realized I had: creative writing. Maybe there are exceptions to that old cliche about an old dog learning new tricks. Now if I could just teach my dogs to ride bikes (or at least not bark at them!), I’d have quiet enjoyment.
703.608.4004