Connecting the Community: Bend
As a kid, I used to follow my father around Bend's Shevlin Center and other projects he was developing for Brooks Resources. Long before I understood what any of it meant, I was already walking job sites with him. My dad worked alongside Bill Smith as he developed the Old Mill District, and apparently even then I had a thing for office supplies — enough that Mr. Smith would tease me about it well into adulthood, warning people I was a pen thief. Fair warning: I still am.
That's the Bend I knew first. The Bend of my twenties was different: my work was something I could always be proud of. My personal choices, less so. I was a confused young person who lived life out loud, and Bend saw most of it. I won't get into the details here. Some chapters are mine to keep.
What I will say is that I kept showing up, and kept building. I worked in marketing — first with RalstonGroup on The Falls at Eagle Crest, then, once I got my real estate license in 2001, with Coldwell Banker and Brooks Resources on projects like Awbrey Park, North Rim, and Deschutes River Ranch in Tumalo. Later, with Newland Communities, I represented RiverRim and built an outreach program with the neighboring elementary school — kids learning the home-building process, then building benches and picnic tables for their own school with what they'd learned. After that came Caldera Springs, where I helped lead the marketing behind what became one of the most successful real estate launches in Oregon history.
In 2007, I moved to Seattle and continued building my real estate career there — new market, new price points(!) and new niche, but the same work I'd found in Bend.
I came back to Bend in 2022, to be with my father as he aged. That return is the real center of this story.
I only had eighteen months with him before he passed. Eighteen months isn't much, set against a lifetime — but I am more grateful for that stretch of time than almost anything else in my life. Walking through Sisters with him, watching him age here in the place that raised us both, being present for the end of his story after so many years of distance — that's the real reason I came home.
Along the way, I found my way back to the OR High Desert Classic, back into the show ring. I found my way back to Mt. Bachelor, back onto the mountain. Bend has grown enormously since I first left it. So have I. What used to feel like a hard place to be has become, slowly and honestly, home — not because the difficulty disappeared, but because I built something real on the other side of it.
This is the town where my story comes full circle. It's also the town where I get to help you write the next chapter of yours.
