Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren Clark
Hi Lauren, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I happened into real estate after one of the most tumultuous points in my life. My husband had a sudden job loss and covid hit a week or two later and I was faced with the label of “non-essential worker” and wasn’t allowed to continue my small business. We were out of luck and without work in a frozen and stressful world. This crisis sent us to take a big risk and move to the Texas Hill Country, because at this point what else could we loose? As we settled into our new town we began to reassess our lives and I started thinking about getting into something totally different than the previous 20 years. I began studying for the real estate exam while the kids were in school and got my license six weeks later. I worked many hours at two jobs trying to make it work and felt like I was just spinning my wheels for nothing. I got in during one of the hardest markets when inventory was tight and paying over asking price was king. It felt like another round of chaos was in the books for my life! I married my old career of photography and online media to my new career in real estate and began a hyper local travel blog about Dripping Springs. It gave me a creative outlet when all I felt like I was doing was cold calling and open houses and the leads started trickling in… now almost all of my business comes from my blog and online presence! This is even after my first real estate company told me that I was wasting my time with social media and needed to get back to the old ways of doing business. I followed my gut and my passion and created something totally new… and it worked!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Never. After having a “mid life crisis” at 25 (15 years earlier than expected), I landed in therapy and had to unwind so many of the unhealthy coping skills and beliefs that I held to, one of which was the belief that if you worked hard enough and did the “right things” then nothing bad would happen to you and life would be easier.
So much of my younger life was white knuckling through life with a positive attitude while pain and disappointed mounded in the basement of my heart… but I kept ignoring it! Everywhere you go… there you are! I had to face these Pollyanna beliefs and learn more about resilience and courage while staring the obstacles square in the face.
Starting a new career in my late 30s gave me the more appropriate expectation that this job was going to be a total grind and that many others would give up long before success came. I am just stubborn enough to push through years of ups and downs to achieve the goal, because failure is not an option!
The first year of real estate was when you had to bid over $100,000 just to get your clients a home, 2022 was rocking along until the FED hiked interest rates faster than they ever have before, and then it was crickets for months. 2023 was a massive slump and many people in mortgage and real estate went out of business. 2024 held promise of lower rates for the spring, but they never came and business continued to grind along very slowly as inventory grew and prices fell. I’ve heard people in the industry say they have never seen anything like this in their 30 years of working in real estate. What a time to jump into the mix! Challenges every way you look at it!
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a real estate agent in Dripping Springs, Texas! When I began in real estate I tried to go all over Austin, but quickly realized that my call to be a great mother while also working would be greatly affected if I were to span an hour radius in every direction so I decided to go small to go big! I began focusing only on the real estate within my school district and started to attend local government, school and development meetings. I started a hyper local blog on all things Dripping Springs and eventually started a youtube channel that features community information, neighborhood tours and more.
What sets me apart from others is my experience with social media and marketing. My background is in wedding photography and I ran a small business doing that solely from social media and blogging since I was 17. Once I decided to create an online space that had a beautiful aesthetic, but was also packed with knowledge and insights about living in Dripping Springs I knew that it would become my super power. I am most proud of following my heart and creating that website as a passion project to fulfill my creativity in a job that is more logical and heady than wedding photography. It keeps me inspired and brings an aspect of fun to what otherwise feels like tons of paperwork and phone calls. 95% of all of my real estate leads now flow from that website!
Another thing that sets me apart is that I dress up at the Grinch at Christmas on Mercer Street in Dripping Springs. I hire a special effects makeup artist and take photos with kids for 7 hours in front of our Magnolia Realty booth. I feel like I work for Disney that day and it is actually so much fun!
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
That I have pretty substantial anxiety! I think I didn’t even know that about myself until recently. I come across pretty confident and happy go lucky in most scenarios, but have a steady stream of cortisol pumping when faced with situations I’m not used to- which has been A LOT in the last few years! I always want to be the best and serve people to my best capacity and feel quite a bit of imposter syndrome with only being in this business for a few years. After my first real estate closing the opposing agent and I had lunch and she asked how long I had been doing real estate. I told her 6 months and that this was my first closing… she thought I had been in it for a decade… what she doesn’t know is that stressful transaction probably sucked a decade off of my life- ha!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://laurenclarkrealtor.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurenlovesdrippingsprings/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laurenlovesdrippingsprings
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@livingindrippingspringstexas
Image Credits
Carrin Lewis Photography, Emily Kimbro Photography, Christina Carrol Photography
