08/25/2026
The real estate business is obsessively focused on numbers, but each individual real estate deal is also a highly personal, emotional journey. The best agents know how to navigate both.
Before I began my career in real estate, I worked as a dean at a Jesuit university. This experience gave me a strong connection to the philosophy of cura personalis, a Latin phrase that means “care for the whole person.” In my work with students, this idea reminded me that all students lead complex lives that could never be completely captured by a student dashboard or GPA. The data on the screen might tell a nice story about how well a student is doing in their classes, but it won’t capture anything about the breakup that sends that student into an emotional tailspin and threatens to derail the entire semester. Part of my job was to build trusting relationships with my students so that they would let me in long enough to help them when challenges appeared.
Latin phrases are a lot less common in the real estate business, but the Jesuit philosophy of cura personalis still guides my work.
Recently, a client asked me to sell his childhood home following his mother’s death. It had taken him two years to build up the strength to make the phone call to find an agent. I knew it wouldn’t be enough just to run an analysis of the neighborhood comps and stick a sign in the yard. After all, that house wasn’t just a three bedroom ranch. It was every Christmas morning of his childhood, all the unsold inventory from his parents’ side hustle business, the comic books he read at night in his bedroom after he was supposed to be asleep. It was also the regret of knowing that his own young kids wouldn’t be able to create new memories in that house with his parents.
On the other hand, the house also represented new goals for the future: college funds, reliable cars, family vacations.
In this case, providing proper care meant balancing all the relevant data points - comps, days on market, the age of those kitchen appliances - with the empathy my client needed to navigate the challenges that accompany an estate sale. It meant assembling a team that could make long-delayed repairs and manage the redistribution of his parents’ accumulated stuff. It meant making sure that the truly special items were protected and handled with care, and that the rest of the items found their way into new homes with people who would enjoy them as my client once had.
Closing on the house was a bittersweet moment for my client, since it was the end of a chapter that had been hugely important for his entire family. But it was also the start of new adventures to come. Helping them bridge that gap was enormously satisfying.
Ultimately, real estate isn’t just about moving property. It’s about guiding people through life’s big transitions. Numbers close deals, but empathy builds trust. By applying cura personalis to every real estate transaction, I do more than sell homes. I protect my clients’ peace of mind. https://substack.com/home/post/p-208780744
