story

In the spring of 2020,

as my first year of chamomile seeds sprouted into tiny seedlings and the annual rain-sunshine tug of war began, I opened the proverbial doors of weave & seed (the practical office door remained shut on account of the pandemic). While I’d been a licensed broker for three and a half years and had experienced three different parent brokerages during that time, the truth is that weave & seed was a lifetime in the making. My values and my approach had been pruned over the years into what they were, I still prune them every day, and I know that they will continue to take shape as time marches on.

I found that each of the brokerages I was apart of, while all lovely in their own rights, did not have the more truly and practically integrated approach to real estate that I knew was the only way this work could and would be fulfilling for me. Instead of continuing to try and fit the scalene octagonal peg I’ve found myself with into round and triangular holes, I took matters into my own hands and began the weave & seed path.

While it wasn’t initially my focus to grow a team, as it turns out, the values and best efforts at integrity have proved to attract some wonderful humans and brokers. I couldn’t say no to the opportunity to work with any one of our crew members. We never did anything I’d call “recruiting” and we grew from one-on-one interactions and word of mouth.

by 2022,

A couple of years in, I found myself busy running the brokerage with less time to continue shifting our systems in the way I wanted to. I was burnt out and had lost motivation. When I make the time, I intend to write about how the broker-brokerage-commission-split model does harm to the industry and the community relationships in it. For the time being, I’ll let that hook of a sentence suffice. In the spring, I was serendipitously offered a role at a local affordable housing non-profit. I took it. I decided it was an opportunity to learn more about the existing institutional approaches to housing, and it was. I tried to support the weave & seed team all the while, but ultimately accepted that weave & seed needed to iterate and enter a phase of rest - everyone on the team found, and made, new homes for themselves.

Come 2023,

After a year in the nonprofit affordable housing world, working with tenant organizing, cooperative ownership models, manufactured and other non-stick built housing types like mass timber, and wildfire recovery, it was time for another shift for me, and weave & seed was ready to awake from its slumber.

There are some nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups doing really phenomenal work in the housing space, innovating and advocating in just the ways we need them to. What always seems to be missing is a concerted, organized, evolving, and earnest private sector coalition of folx in the real estate industry, in the belly of the beast, making change and ready to keep doing so. That is the hope and mission of the Integrated programming that weave & seed will be launching.

— ct