08/14/2026
A Long and Somewhat Unconventional Road to Santa Fe Real Estate
I didn't move to Santa Fe in 1991 because I had a master plan to become a real estate broker.
I had just graduated from Bates College in Maine, loved skiing, and wanted to be in the mountains. Santa Fe seemed like a pretty good place to figure out the rest. For a while, that meant managing restaurants and bars at night and skiing whenever I could during the day.
More than thirty years later, I'm still here.
Along the way, I built an Internet company, worked with real estate companies during the early days of online property marketing, helped create an emergency website during the Cerro Grande Fire, married a woman who has spent most of her career caring for women and families in Northern New Mexico, raised three kids, started a community effort during COVID, and eventually found my way into real estate myself.
In retrospect, the path makes more sense than it probably did while I was living it.
A lot of my career has involved the same basic problem: somebody is looking for something, somebody else has it, and there's a gap between them that needs to be bridged.
These days, that gap usually involves real estate.
# # Making a Life in Santa Fe
One reason my relationship with Santa Fe is so personal is that this isn't simply where I work. It's where Lori and I built our life.
My wife, **Lori Pearson Kramer, RN, CNM, MSN**, has spent more than two decades caring for people in this community. Her path started in social work in rural South Dakota and eventually brought her into nursing. She worked in labor and delivery at St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe before earning her master's degree in Nursing and Nurse-Midwifery from the University of New Mexico.
Over the years, Lori has cared for New Mexico women and families through pregnancy and birth, including extensive work in out-of-hospital birth, and later through women's health and primary care. Today, through **Santa Fe Women's Health**, her practice draws on conventional medicine as well as her experience with nutrition, functional medicine and integrative approaches to healthcare.
She was also part of my early business life. When Trafficdeveloper was growing, Lori worked with me on operations, project management, copywriting and the million other things that come with building a small company.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, we also raised three kids.
Lori and I work in very different professions, but over the years we've realized that there are some similarities. Both involve people making consequential decisions about things they may not fully understand. Both put you in a position where someone has to trust your knowledge and judgment. And in both professions, listening is often more useful than talking.
Santa Fe is where all of that happened for us. Our careers, family, friends and a large part of our history are here.
That history matters when I work with someone in real estate.
I've lived here long enough to know that Santa Fe isn't one real estate market. An old adobe on the Eastside, a contemporary house in the foothills, a place on acreage outside town and an in-town condo can be separated by a few miles and involve completely different questions.
Wells, septic systems, acequias, easements, drainage, wildfire considerations, old adobe construction, additions of uncertain vintage and mountain roads aren't abstractions when you've lived around them for decades.
Knowing the comps matters.
Knowing the place matters too.
# # Before Google
My involvement with technology started in the mid-1990s, when the Internet was still new enough that businesses weren't entirely sure what they were supposed to do with it.
I worked with a Santa Fe web-development company called Symtezzi. We could build websites, but I became interested in another question: once you built one, how did anybody find it?
This was 1996. Google didn't exist yet.
I started learning how Yahoo and the early search engines worked, how websites got indexed, and what made one business appear when somebody searched while another disappeared into the Internet wilderness.
Eventually we'd call a lot of this search engine optimization. At the time, we were mostly figuring it out as we went.
By 1999, I was taking on search-marketing clients of my own. A couple of years later I would start Trafficdeveloper.
But in between, something happened that changed the way I thought about what the Internet could actually be useful for.
# # The Cerro Grande Fire
In May 2000, the Cerro Grande Fire got out of control and Los Alamos and White Rock were evacuated.
It was frightening. Thousands of people had to leave their homes, often without knowing what they would be coming back to. Meanwhile, people all over Northern New Mexico were asking how they could help.
My partners at Symtezzi and I realized there was a fairly obvious problem: the people who needed things and the people offering those things had no easy way to find one another.
Remember, this was 2000. No Facebook. No Nextdoor. No smartphone in everybody's pocket.
So we built **nmfire.info**.
We threw the site together from scratch in our Santa Fe office, hosted it ourselves and organized it around two basic categories:
**Needs and Offerings.**
Someone might need a place to stay, transportation, food, supplies or somewhere to keep an animal. Someone else might have a spare bedroom, a truck, some food or exactly the thing that person needed.
The website gave them a way to find each other.
We worked around the clock keeping it running and dealing with thousands of emails and phone calls. Local and national media picked up the story, which brought even more people to us.
Looking back now, it's tempting to compare what we built to the community functions that eventually became routine on social media, but that wasn't what we thought we were doing. We weren't trying to invent anything.
There was an emergency happening up the road, we knew how to build websites, and this was something useful we could do.
Later that year, the **Code of the West Foundation** recognized our work as part of its *Heroes of The Cerro Grande Celebration — Many Cultures, One People.*
I still have a photograph from September 25, 2000, standing with my partners Kerry Usry and Shane Robinson and then-Governor Gary Johnson, with the award around my neck.
I'm proud of that photograph, but mostly because of what it reminds me of.
For all the talk over the years about technology changing the world, technology is usually at its best when nobody particularly cares about the technology. They care that it worked. They care that someone answered. They care that they found the person or information they needed.
That idea ended up following me into almost everything I did afterward.
# # Trafficdeveloper and Real Estate
I started **Trafficdeveloper** in 2001.
It began primarily around search-engine marketing and grew into a full-service Internet company. We designed and built websites, hosted them, developed software and e-commerce systems, and handled online marketing and SEO.
Over the years we participated in nearly 200 online marketing campaigns and at one point had around 150 active clients.
A significant part of our work was in real estate.
We designed, built, maintained and marketed websites for real estate companies around the country, including companies in high-end and luxury markets. Our work included website and extranet development associated with **Christie's Great Estates**.
This was happening while real estate itself was going through an enormous change.
Today it's hard to imagine buying a house without first looking online. Back then, making MLS listings searchable by consumers on a real estate website was still a big deal. We were working with online real estate during those formative years of IDX and consumer-facing property search.
I spent years thinking about how people searched for properties, what made them click on one instead of another, how real estate companies presented themselves online and how technology was shifting information from the industry to the consumer.
I didn't know at the time that I would eventually become a broker.
When I finally did, in 2017, it turned out that quite a lot of what I'd been doing for the previous twenty years came with me.
# # Becoming a Broker
When I joined Sotheby's International Realty in Santa Fe, I expected there would be a learning curve. There was.
Understanding real estate from the marketing and technology side is not the same thing as sitting across the table from someone who is about to spend a significant part of their savings on a house—or someone who has decided it's time to sell a property they've owned for twenty years.
That's where I learned what I really liked about this business.
The people.
I sometimes refer to my clients as **"my people."**
I didn't come up with that as branding. It's just something I started saying.
Once I've agreed to represent someone, I feel responsible for them. That doesn't mean making their decisions for them. It means giving them the best information I can, telling them what I actually think, finding expertise when we need it, solving the problems we can solve, and remembering whose interests I'm supposed to be protecting.
That applies whether I'm working with someone buying their first house, selling a family home, purchasing land or negotiating a multimillion-dollar estate.
# # When I'm Working With a Buyer
I don't think my job is to show a buyer the greatest possible number of houses.
I'd rather understand someone well enough to show them fewer.
What do you really care about? How do you live? Why are you moving? What compromises will bother you a year from now? What do you think you need that perhaps you don't? And what haven't you thought to ask?
Santa Fe can make those questions particularly interesting.
A house can look wonderful and have a difficult road. A rural property can introduce questions about wells, septic, utilities and access. An old adobe can contain extraordinary craftsmanship along with several generations of creative decision-making by previous owners.
I'm not an inspector, engineer, attorney or contractor, and I don't pretend to be.
But after living here for more than thirty years, I've developed relationships with a lot of people who know things I don't.
One of my rules is pretty simple:
**If I don't know, I'll find someone who does.**
The goal isn't to sell somebody a house.
It's to help them make a decision they'll still feel good about after the excitement of buying it has worn off.
# # When I'm Selling a Home
The other half of the equation is representing sellers, and this is where my years in marketing probably influence me most.
With a buyer, I'm trying to understand what they're looking for.
With a seller, I'm asking the question from the other direction:
**Who is looking for what you have?**
Before I start thinking about advertising a property, I want to understand it.
What makes this house different? What is likely to matter to a buyer? What might concern one? Who do I think that buyer is? What should we repair before going to market? What should we leave alone? Where is it worth spending money, and where would we just be spending money because somebody told us that's what sellers are supposed to do?
I've spent enough time around homes and contractors in Santa Fe to know that preparing a property for sale can turn into an expensive exercise very quickly.
The goal isn't perfection.
It's making good decisions.
# # Every House Has a Story
One thing I've learned from years of marketing is that data and story aren't opposites. You need both.
A seller knows things about a home that don't show up in MLS data.
They know where the morning light comes in.
They know which patio everyone ends up sitting on.
They know what was rebuilt, restored or planted and why.
They know that a room everybody calls the office was once the nursery, or that the view from a particular window is the reason they bought the house twenty years ago.
Those details don't replace square footage, condition, comparable sales or market data.
But the numbers don't always explain why one house makes someone stop and look again while another doesn't.
Part of my job is figuring out which parts of a property's story actually matter to the next owner—and making sure we're telling that story well.
# # Pricing Is Marketing Too
I also think pricing is part of marketing.
The price affects who finds the property, what other houses they're comparing it with, whether they perceive value and whether they feel any urgency to act.
That's why I try to have a very straightforward conversation with sellers about price.
Sometimes the market supports exactly what an owner hopes their home is worth.
Sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes a distinctive Santa Fe property doesn't fit neatly into a spreadsheet and we have to use judgment.
I don't think a broker does a seller any favors by suggesting whatever number is most likely to win the listing.
I'd rather explain what I'm seeing in the market, talk through the options, agree on a strategy and adjust when the evidence tells us we should.
# # Marketing Has Changed. The Objective Hasn't.
I've watched real estate marketing change for close to thirty years.
There was a time when simply putting searchable listings on a website was innovative.
Now almost every property for sale is online.
So being online isn't much of a marketing strategy anymore.
How a property is presented is.
Photography matters. The words matter. Pricing matters. The order in which someone experiences the property matters. Search visibility and distribution matter. The Sotheby's International Realty network matters. Knowing which features to emphasize—and which ones not to oversell—matters.
I'm still a technology person. I enjoy new tools and I'm usually an early adopter.
But I've also been around technology long enough to be skeptical of using something simply because it's new.
I don't particularly care whether a marketing tool sounds impressive.
I care whether it helps sell the house.
# # Getting an Offer Isn't the Finish Line
An offer is obviously a good thing.
It is also the beginning of a different part of the job.
The highest number on the page isn't always the strongest offer. Financing, contingencies, timing, inspections, appraisal, concessions and the probability that the transaction will actually close all matter.
Then there is everything that happens after a property goes under contract.
Inspections uncover things. Appraisals raise questions. Lenders make requests. Buyers get nervous. Sellers get frustrated. Deadlines arrive. Occasionally something completely unexpected happens.
That's when I think a broker earns a significant part of the commission.
My job is to make sure my seller understands what's happening, what the choices are, what I think about those choices, and that somebody is actively protecting their position all the way to closing.
A seller is one of **my people** too.
# # Every Price Point Matters
Over the years I've represented buyers and sellers across a pretty broad range of Northern New Mexico real estate: condominiums, first homes, investment properties, land, rural properties, new construction, historic Santa Fe houses and multimillion-dollar estates.
My public sales history now reflects roughly 150 transactions and consistently strong client reviews.
I'm proud of that, but I've never wanted my business defined only by expensive houses.
A $300,000 home can represent a much larger percentage of everything one person owns than a multimillion-dollar property does for someone else.
The responsibility doesn't get smaller because the number does.
# # The Gene Hackman Estate
In February 2026, I represented the buyer of the longtime Santa Fe estate of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa.
The property is an extraordinary contemporary compound on more than 50 acres in the Santa Fe Summit. It had been offered for $6.25 million and went under contract after only eight days.
Given Gene Hackman's career and the circumstances surrounding his and Betsy's deaths the previous year, the sale attracted intense national media attention.
Reporters understandably wanted to know who had bought it.
I declined to comment and took additional steps throughout the transaction to protect my buyer's identity and personal information.
I mention the transaction because it was a significant piece of Santa Fe real estate and I'm proud to have represented the buyer. But the part that means the most to me isn't the famous name attached to the property.
It's that my client trusted me.
Privacy and discretion aren't particularly glamorous parts of real estate, but they're important ones. My client had hired me to represent them, not to satisfy public curiosity.
The house could be in the news.
My buyer didn't need to be.
# # Twenty Years Later, Another Community Needed Help
During COVID, I found myself thinking about connections again.
Santa Fe restaurants were getting crushed. At the same time, doctors, nurses, hospital employees, firefighters, police officers and other first responders were going to work every day under circumstances none of us had experienced before.
We started **Santa Fe Feeds First Responders** around a simple idea: raise money that could be spent with local restaurants to feed and thank the people working on the front lines.
That way a contribution could help twice.
The community took it from there.
What started with roughly $4,000 raised in the first couple of days ultimately grew to nearly **$50,000**.
One of our partners, **What The Truck**, took the effort even further and ultimately donated more than **8,000 meals** to area hospitals, fire stations, police stations and other frontline workers.
I don't bring this up because I want credit for feeding 8,000 people. A lot of people made that happen.
What interests me when I look back on it is how familiar the basic idea was.
Twenty years earlier, during Cerro Grande, we had built a website around two categories:
**Needs and Offerings.**
During COVID, the circumstances were completely different, but the questions were almost the same.
Who needs something?
Who has something to offer?
How can we connect them?
Apparently that's a problem I keep finding interesting.
# # Home
After more than three decades, Santa Fe is hard for me to separate into personal and professional categories.
It's where Lori and I raised our family. It's where we built our careers. It's where our friends are. It's where we've watched businesses open and close, neighborhoods change, children grow up and a small city wrestle with becoming a somewhat bigger one.
Living here has also changed the way I think about houses.
A house is absolutely an asset. For many people, it's the largest financial asset they'll ever own.
But that's only one thing it is.
It's where somebody wakes up every morning.
Where kids grow up.
Where friends come through the door.
Where the dog destroys something expensive.
Where dinner gets burned.
Where birthdays happen.
Where families change.
Where somebody looks out a window at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and thinks, *I get to live here.*
And eventually, sometimes, it's the place someone decides they're ready to leave so it can become part of somebody else's story.
That's the part of real estate that doesn't show up in price per square foot.
# # Technology Changes. People Don't Change Nearly as Much.
I've now spent most of my professional life around technology.
I marketed websites before Google. We built an online community response before social media. I watched real estate listings move onto the Internet. I worked in SEO before most businesses knew what SEO was. I watched smartphones put the Internet in everyone's pocket, real estate portals change how people shop for homes, and now artificial intelligence begin another major shift.
I still find all of it fascinating.
But spending that long around technology has also taught me not to confuse the tool with the outcome.
A website is a tool.
IDX is a tool.
Google is a tool.
Social media is a tool.
AI is a tool.
The question that interests me is what you're trying to accomplish for the person on the other side of it.
In 2000, that might have meant helping an evacuated family find somewhere to stay.
In 2020, it might have meant supporting a struggling restaurant while getting dinner to an exhausted hospital worker.
Today, it might mean helping someone moving across the country figure out which Santa Fe neighborhood feels like home.
Or helping someone who has lived in that home for twenty years find the person who's going to love it next.
The tools change.
People don't change nearly as much.
# # Experienced. Motivated. Ethical.
I've used three words in my real estate business for a long time:
**Experienced. Motivated. Ethical.**
They're admittedly simple words, but I've kept them because they still describe what I think the job requires.
Experience doesn't mean pretending to have every answer. It means knowing enough to recognize the important questions and knowing where to find the answers you don't have.
Motivation means doing the extra work when something gets difficult rather than disappearing when a transaction stops being easy.
And ethics mostly comes down to remembering one question:
**Whose interests am I here to protect?**
The price can change.
The house can change.
The technology certainly changes.
The responsibility doesn't.
# # The Houses Are Just Where the Story Happens
More than thirty years after I arrived in Santa Fe, I find myself doing something surprisingly similar to what I was doing during the earliest years of my Internet career.
Trying to understand what somebody is looking for.
Understanding what somebody else has to offer.
Finding good information.
Connecting people.
Solving problems.
And taking care of the people who have trusted me to help.
The difference is that these days the subject is usually a house.
Maybe that's why real estate ultimately felt less like a career change than it probably looked from the outside.
For me, the work was never really about websites.
And it isn't really about houses either.
**It's about people.**
I call them **my people**.
**The houses are just where the story happens.**
