The Pivot and the Pause
Darla Greenwaldt Real Estate is officially back in business. In all honesty, I never really left real estate, my focused just changed. Some would say I pivoted. You know how they say you can pivot 1 degree and in five years it can change your trajectory to a totally new direction.
So, you may already know that 2010 is when I decided to jump feet first into real estate and never turn back, after being 24 hours away from death from a misdiagnosis and eventually, MRSA. If you are wanting to become successful, then there is no other way to do it other than go all in. Even then, you may never get to the level you dream. However, you will get further than you were when you started, I can guarantee that.
I slowly built my business and raised my kids side by side since 2010. It was a struggle navigating the guilt of spending time away from them while building my business, and then the guilt of spending time with my kids and leaving the business on pause.
The first pivot came around 2017 when a friend and past client became my business partner in starting a commercial flipping company. We purchased, flipped, and sold more than 20 properties from 2017 to 2022. They were time consuming and intense, so my real estate brokerage side of the business was pushed to the back a bit as I was focused on the flips while also raising my very demanding kids. As the years went by and more money was made, along came more work. If you know me, I don’t do anything halfway, so I put everything into each project.
The pause came in 2021. I still get misty eyed just thinking of that year. I was at the top of my game. I sold $21M that year, plus business investments and personal flip profit. Then on October 31, 2021 it all changed. My 14 year old daughter had just started her freshman year of high school. If I look back I can see the signs, but when they are are so close to you, they are easy to miss. Some of you may know this, but most of you do not know this. My daughter attempted suicide on October 31, 2021. To add insult to injury, it was while I was living it up, golfing at the Castle Pines Country Club.
Fortunately, the pills she found and took were not effective, but I immediately hit pause on my business. I finished the flip we were in the middle of, which sold for the highest price ever in early 2022, sold my one year old country club membership (my first of many monetary losses over the next five years), divorced my husband , and started looking for a house in the mountains. Nothing mattered more than my kids and I wanted to reconnect and spend time with them. We moved to Eagle, CO early in 2023 and I was with my kids pretty much 24-7 since 2022. My daughter is 19 now, is doing well, and has given me the okay to write about her, which I plan to give full attention to in a separate story. This incident and the years that followed changed me and our entire family.
I can look back now and see how my business trajectory changed by focusing on the flips. How I easily gave into every request to keep the job on track, and attended to every detail, and how I missed what was happening at home. It’s easy to blame yourself, as a parent, when something like this happens; and I still do to some extent, but life has a way of making you pay attention. It was not her time yet, thankfully, and I needed a refocus. The details of our past 5 years of life are novel worthy, and could finally be how I write that book I’ve been talking about for years. I’m finally coming out of the shock and the subsequent roller coaster of feelings that followed in the years after.
Right now, in 2026, I’ve decided to slowly press play again. Our family’s health is well, my kids are doing as good as can be expected, and my husband and I repaired our marriage in 2023 and we are back together. Like I said, novel worthy.
So, it is time for me to shit or get off the pot, so to speak. I can’t take the rest of my life off and I need to provide for my family. I had some financial struggles starting in 2025, which mostly came from down market conditions and one bad investment I made in 2023 that I was not able to recover from. I will dive into that one another time, as it’s a doozy. I recently briefly took a 9-5 job at a valuations start-up, as I thought maybe I wanted to work in the corporate sector again. After my 25 year old supervisor took 3 hours to review an evaluation I prepared in 1 hour, making me stay late, and called me bro for the fifth time, I was out. After doing the math, the lunches, the gas, the commute time, the clothes, etc you need to pay in order to work at an office these days really eats into the salary you get and makes it hard to justify the job itself. Not to mention, I was the top real estate analyst after 1 month, so my skills were being under-utilized and under-appreciated, and of course under-paid. So I quit.
Here I am… back in the real estate game and living back in the Golden-Morrison area. The players have changed, but the game has not. For some reason I thought I was aged out of the game, but the age doesn’t matter. It’s the commitment, the knowledge, the expertise, the attitude, and the mindset that keep you relevant and motivated.
I’ve always said selling real estate is hard, but now I think raising healthy kids, keeping a marriage alive after 18 years, remodeling properties, making good business decisions and investments, and also working 9-5 - Monday through Friday is much harder! Kudos to those of you who have stuck it out in the corporate world all these years, and kudos to all my real estate contemporaries who have made it in real estate. There are only a handful of you left from when we all met in the business back in 2000-2005. Wow, what a ride it has been in my first 50 years on this earth. So many stories to tell. Let’s see what the next 25 years will bring. Stay with me. If you are going to buy or sell a property, we might as well have some fun while protecting your hard-earned real estate investment and I can offer significant savings to my dearest friends and clients. If you are reading this, than that is you!
