How These Agents Found Success in the Face of Tragedy

Amanda Marsh and Amie Quirarte shared their personal experiences at Inman Connect New York on Thursday and talked about channeling endurance and resilience.

Article Originally Published by Inman Connect

When Amanda Marsh was 15, her life turned upside down.

While visiting her extended family for Thanksgiving in November 1993, she received a phone call from her grandfather detailing the unthinkable: Her mother, father, and sister had all been killed in a car crash on the way to pick her up at the airport, leaving her an orphan.

“I went from being a 15-year-old carefree teenager that wants to go to the mall, to a part of me died with them that day,” Marsh told the crowd at Inman Connect New York on Thursday. “That was my life-defining moment where I looked internally at ‘who am I going to be?’”

Marsh, an agent at Cantrell Real Estate in Springfield, Missouri, spoke on a panel with Amie Quirarte, of Tahoe Luxury Properties, moderated by Inman CEO Emily Paquette about channeling endurance and resilience when confronted with dramatic change.

For Quirarte, real estate offered an opportunity to succeed regardless of her background.

Quirarte’s father committed suicide when she was 9 years old, and her mother struggled with drug addiction. She was raised by her grandfather, who was married to an addict.

“We had a lot of turbulence in my life,” she said. “Most of my life was spent going in and out of homeless shelters, not knowing where my next meal was going to come from.”

When her grandfather died, Quirarte moved to Santa Barbara to attend community college, a moment she felt was her first opportunity to escape her family’s troubled past.

Because she had no family to support her, she worked several jobs to keep herself afloat while attending school and ended up having to drop out of community college.

“I have never felt like such a failure in my entire life than I did at that time,” she said. “I genuinely had no idea what I would do that would be different than what I was destined to do.”

But then, she started working in the real estate industry.

“It sounds really cheesy and really cliche, but it changed my life in a very big and important way,” she said.

Real estate presented itself to Quirarte as a world where she could achieve real success and where her background couldn’t slow her down, and the only thing that mattered was her own competence.

“It didn’t matter, my education background or my family background,” she said. “Real estate does not discriminate. Success in this business is truly what you make it. It does not have to be about where you came from or what success you’ve had in other ventures. It’s all about you, and that’s awesome.”

 

Amie Quirarte is a luxury real estate agent with Tahoe Luxury Properties in California and Nevada. Connect with her on Facebook or LinkedIn.