Alma, REALTOR - Riverside and San Bernardino California

Listening to your hopes and dreams

For me, much of the process of helping people buy and/or sell a home is about building a working relationship with them. It is extremely important to get to know them well in order to meet their needs and locate the best situation possible for them. I ask them questions about themselves, their work, and their children. I try to find out about the people in their lives that they want nearby. And as much as possible, I try to put their past and present together to help them find their future home.

My own background is in education, and I taught at the post-secondary level for some twelve years before coming to real estate. Many of my teaching methods were devoted to expanding communication skills, and so I learned to listen closely and to explain ideas and processes in many ways. Having myself transferred from the University of Hawaii to the University of California at Berkeley before going on to graduate work at Yale University, I learned a lot about navigating large institutions with complex rules, and much of the help I offered students consisted of counseling them in how to go about acquiring an education. I have since found that the services that I offer my real estate clients are very similar—but without their having to take exams!

My family and our dogs

You may have noticed that the photos of me on this page turn into photos of dogs when you scroll over them! That’s due in part to my husband’s sense of humor and mostly to our family’s love of dogs. Almost all of our dogs have been rescues, either adopted directly from the pound, found on the street, or adopted from rescue groups. When we moved from Santa Monica to Riverside some years ago, we chose our property precisely because it would have lots of play room for children and dogs, and that’s probably why the latter have always found us!

In many ways, Riverside is still transitioning from a rural to a suburban culture, and there are both pluses and minuses to this situation. On the one hand, you can still find spacious homes on large lots at much more affordable prices than on the coast. On the other hand, you will also find that there are unspayed and unneutered animals wandering about. A large number of dogs and cats are euthanized each year here, so please keep your animals from “littering” and adopt if you can rather than buying from backyard breeders. Please make sure that you renew your dogs’ licenses each year, have up-to-date info on their tags, and get them implanted with your information in case they lose their collars. I return dogs to their owners whenever I can, but there are times when we just can’t accommodate them while looking for their families and have to call the pound. So please have your dogs labelled for their return just in case they get lost because, for all of our civilization’s many advances, we still haven’t learned to understand their directions for taking them home to you!

See my husbands site at: http://www.physics.ucr.edu/faculty_staff/faculty_pages/barish.html

See links to books that I have stories in.

Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America

Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas

Here are a few pictures of my daughter:

Alma - Riverside and San Bernardino California Realtor

Listening to your hopes and dreams

My family and our dogs