I got here through the water, not the office

My story

Diving came first

I am a spearfisherman, a lobster diver and a freediver. I have dove in a few other places, but the vast majority of my diving and spearfishing has been right here in South Florida. This is my water. I know it in the specific, unglamorous way you only get from being in it over and over across years and seasons.

Freediving in particular changes how you see a coastline. You are not skimming across the top of it. You are down in it, holding your breath, paying attention to things most people on the surface never think about. How the bottom actually falls away from a seawall. Where the current runs hard and where it goes slack. How much the water moves between tides, and what that means for anything trying to pass through. When you spend that many hours under the surface, depth and access stop being abstract numbers on a page. They become physical facts you have felt.

Lobster season is a big part of it for me. So is the hunt generally, which is a slow, patient, observational thing rather than an exciting one. You learn structure. You learn that two spots a hundred yards apart can be completely different, and that the only way to know is to go look. That instinct turned out to translate almost directly into waterfront real estate.

When I am not in the water, I am usually on a golf course. Different pace, same appeal: reading conditions, thinking a few shots ahead, accepting that the ground tells you what is possible rather than the other way around.

How that became a job

Houses got me long before the water did. I have had a thing for them since I was a kid. I grew up admiring Frank Lloyd Wright, the way he made a building sit in its landscape instead of on top of it, and for years I was completely sure I was going to be an architect.

Then I ran into the math. I am not going to dress that up. I figured out somewhere along the way that I do a lot better with people than I do with equations, and that architecture was going to be a fight I would spend my whole career losing. Letting go of it stung for a while. What I did not lose was the part underneath it, which was caring about how a house sits on its piece of land and why that makes it feel right or wrong to stand in.

So I started my real estate career in Ocala, up in Central Florida. Good place to learn the actual job. You find out quickly whether you like sitting with people through the biggest financial decision of their lives, and it turned out I did.

But I already knew where I wanted to end up. South Florida is my forever home, and I was spending every spare stretch of time down here in the water anyway. Eventually the commute between my life and my career stopped making sense. I moved my license down, joined Keller Williams, and pointed the whole thing at the water I already knew.

The two halves finally lined up. The kid who wanted to know why a house belongs where it is turned into the guy who asks whether your boat can actually get out from behind it.

How I work

I try to be the person who says the unflattering thing early. If a canal will not hold your boat, I will tell you before you fly down to see it. If a bridge number is disputed between sources, I will show you both numbers rather than the one that helps me. If something has not been verified, I will say so plainly instead of dressing up a guess.

A lot of my buyers are out of state, so I do virtual showings before anybody books a flight. I will walk the property on video, take you down the dock, show you the seawall and the canal and what the actual view is, and answer questions live while I am standing there. It saves people from burning a weekend and a plane ticket on a house that was never going to work, and it means that when you do come down, you are touring a short list you already trust.

That means my guides on this site have visible markers on them wherever a figure still needs confirming. It looks less polished. It is a lot more useful.