Tessa Poyner told her husband she wanted to get her real estate license. Then she told him the fine print: if she bought the course, they’d have exactly $19 left in their bank account until the next paycheck.

He said, “Do it. Bet on yourself.”

That was February 1st, 2024. On February 26th, she was fully licensed and onboarded at eXp Realty with Powerhouse. Twenty-six days, start to finish, studying until 3 a.m. every night with a toddler asleep down the hall.

Year one, she did $2.5 million. Year two, $5 million, while pregnant and on bed rest for an entire trimester. Now she’s in year three and on pace to close $10 million, working about 20 hours a week from a coffee shop in Everett, Washington. This week’s episode of The Powerhouse Effect is her whole story, and I’m still not over it. Let’s get into it.

Is real estate a good career for moms?

Tessa didn’t get into real estate because she loved houses. She got in because of math that’ll punch you in the stomach.

She and her husband waited 10 years for their daughter. When she finally arrived, they ran the numbers on their salaried jobs: the 9-to-5s that were really 8-to-6s, the getting-ready-at-7. Their daughter was awake about 12 hours a day, and they were going to see her for less than two of them.

So they asked a different question: if we could start our careers over at 30, what would we pick to get the most time with our kids AND an income that isn’t capped? Her husband chose firefighting. Tessa chose real estate, with logic so clean I want to frame it: homes are the product. People already want to buy and sell them. She didn’t have to convince anyone of anything, just help them do the thing they already wanted to do, and do it really well.

That’s the honest answer to whether this is a good career for moms. Not “it’s flexible,” which is what the recruiting brochures say. It’s that nobody caps your income and nobody owns your hours. Tessa spent her entire first year taking her daughter to the zoo every week, story time every week, and missed NOTHING. Her word, not mine. And she matched her old salary doing it.

How fast can you get your real estate license?

Tessa did it in 26 days: the 90-hour course, the test three weeks in, fully onboarded within a week of passing.

I’m not telling you that’s the standard. Plenty of people take a year, and Tessa says go at the pace your life allows. She just didn’t have that luxury. With $19 in the account and her husband taking a big pay cut to start at the fire academy, the corner she painted herself into became the engine. “If I’m going to bet on myself, I’m not going to fail. There’s no other option.”

Here’s what to steal from that, even if your bank account looks nothing like hers: she treated getting licensed like a sprint with a finish line, not a someday project. Most agents never actually decide. They enroll, they drift, they re-enroll. Tessa decided, and the course was open on the kitchen table at 3 a.m. because the decision had already been made.

How much can a part-time real estate agent actually make?

Let’s put Tessa’s year one in real-people numbers, because real estate brains are broken and I say that with love.

She did $2.5 million in production across five transactions, roughly one every other month. Say that on a real estate stage and it feels like nothing. But run it at a 3% commission and that’s about $75,000 topline. Take out maybe $15,000 in expenses and she brought home around $60,000 her first year.

Now the number that actually matters: she was working about 10 hours a week. Solo parenting a toddler, husband away at the academy, zero paid childcare. Scale her output to a normal 40-hour week and you’re looking at $240,000 a year, theoretically. That’s the earning engine hiding inside a “small” first year.

Year two she doubled it to $5 million, call it $150,000 topline, on 15 to 20 hours a week. While growing a human. While on bed rest for her whole second trimester. While taking a maternity leave.

This is why I keep saying production is a vanity metric until you divide it by the hours it cost you. A $2.5 million year at 10 hours a week isn’t a small business. It’s a wildly efficient one that hasn’t been given more hours yet.

How do you get your first client as a new real estate agent?

Tessa’s first transaction didn’t come from cold calls or a lead funnel. It came from a conversation at her husband’s fire academy graduation.

She got talking with a couple who had just moved to the area for the department, and they mentioned they were house hunting. Her exact move: “Oh, well, I’m a real estate agent. I would love to help you guys.” She showed them one home. They wrote an offer, it got accepted, and it closed in three weeks.

That’s it. That’s the secret. Your first deal is almost never a marketing outcome. It’s an open-mouth outcome, in a room your life already put you in. Tessa says her sphere was a slow burn after that, the way it is for everyone. But the first check came from being unashamed to say the sentence out loud.

And no, she didn’t grind expireds with a toddler on her hip. I’ve been there. You can’t even call your mom with a 2-year-old in the room, let alone a stranger. There’s a season where your business gets built quietly, from home, in the margins. It counts just the same.

How do you grow Instagram as a local real estate agent?

When Tessa got licensed, she had about 800 Instagram followers, and every post was her daughter. Today she’s over 10,000, and here’s the part most agents miss: it’s mostly LOCAL people.

She calls herself “the local girl.” She shares what she and her family love about living in Everett: the spots, the outings, the life. Her content is just the overflow of a life lived there. That audience isn’t 10,000 vanity followers scattered across the country. It’s a city full of people who feel like they know her, which is exactly who hires you.

The other half of her visibility strategy costs about $6 a day: she works out of a coffee shop several days a week, because her family of four lives in an 850-square-foot house and her office is the kitchen. She runs into people all day long as she sits there. Visibility isn’t always a content calendar. Sometimes it’s a table by the window in the same shop, every week, in the town where everyone knows your name.

If the content half is where you stall out every week, that’s the exact gap The Weekly Edit was built to close: your week of posts, done, so you can go sit by the window.

How do you choose a brokerage as a brand-new agent?

Tessa’s advice to nervous new agents is blunt: who you join under really matters.

She joined Powerhouse because the two women she’d been doing marketing work for, agents she’d trusted for decades, made the move themselves in January. She followed in February. They became her sponsors and mentors, 15 years of experience showing her the ropes from day one, and the way our model works, they win every time she wins. She calls it hitting the jackpot: she never had to bounce between brokerages collecting bad experiences, because she started where she’d be poured into.

And about the fear I hear constantly, that a new agent NEEDS a physical office to learn: Tessa had $19 and zero experience, joined a cloud-based brokerage anyway, and spent her first spring watching Powerhouse trainings every single night from her kitchen. When she hears agents describe what their old brokerages took from them, her response is, “I’m so lucky to have no idea what you guys are talking about.”

Someone has to teach you how to be a real estate agent, because the license course won’t. So before you sign anywhere, interview them like it’s a hiring decision, because it is. That’s exactly why I built How to Hire a Broker, 20 questions no broker can talk their way around. It’s free. Ask them cold.

How do you scale to a $10M pace working 20 hours a week?

Tessa has doubled her production every year: $2.5 million, then $5 million, now a $10 million pace. And she’s done it in what I’d call some of the toughest markets we’ve seen in 35 years, in an outbound market where a lot of her sellers are leaving Washington entirely and never buying back.

Her take on that still makes me laugh: “That’s what people tell me. I didn’t know the business before, so I just keep telling myself, if I can do this now, imagine how much easier it could get.”

Here’s the actual mechanism, because it isn’t hustle. Year one, you spend most of your hours figuring out how to get business. Year two, you build systems around what worked, so you close more deals without adding hours. By year three, the machine mostly runs: when Tessa took an unplanned two-night trip to Canada for her son’s first birthday, she had a closing that same day. Everything was communicated in advance, she had boots on the ground at home through relationships she built inside Powerhouse, and nothing needed her.

Twenty hours a week. A $10 million pace. Her results are hers, but the sequence is learnable, and it’s the same sequence I teach inside The $10M Agent Playbook: figure it out once, systematize it, then protect your hours like they’re the product. Because they are.

The $18,000 notification

Driving home from that Canada trip, Tessa’s phone buzzed. A deposit notification from her bank: $18,000. The closing had gone through while she was doing family things on a random Tuesday.

She started crying in the car. “We had one baby and $19 in our bank account. And we bet on ourselves. And now we’re coming home from a trip that wasn’t even planned, and our whole life has changed.”

I told her the part I believe most: the magic is that she DECIDED it was going to change. You decide, you say it out loud, and then the people you’re supposed to meet and the things you need start showing up. Tessa watched one YouTube video about Powerhouse on February 2nd and told her husband, “You have to watch this.” Twenty-four days later she was licensed. Now she’s the video for somebody else, proof of concept for every mom who needs to see a future version of herself before she can move.

FAQ: Getting Licensed, Part-Time Hours, and First Clients

How long does it take to become a real estate agent? Tessa Poyner went from buying the course to fully licensed and onboarded at eXp Realty in 26 days. Most people take two to six months. The bigger variable isn’t the timeline, it’s whether you’ve actually decided.

Can you really do real estate part time as a mom? Tessa built to $2.5 million on about 10 hours a week her first year, with no paid childcare, and now runs a $10 million pace at about 20. Her results are hers, not a promise. But the model of tight hours, local visibility, and systems is repeatable.

Do new agents need an office to succeed? No. Tessa joined a cloud-based brokerage as a brand-new agent, trained every night from her kitchen through Powerhouse’s recorded sessions, and works from a coffee shop. New agents need teaching and community, not a cubicle.

Where do first clients actually come from? Usually from a room your life already put you in. Tessa’s first deal came from a conversation at her husband’s fire academy graduation, closed within three weeks. Say the sentence out loud: “I’m a real estate agent. I’d love to help.”

Does who sponsors you at a brokerage matter? It might be the single biggest decision you make. Tessa followed two agents she’d trusted for decades, and they mentored her from her first day. Someone has to teach you how to be an agent. Choose your someone on purpose.

What’s next?

If you’re a solo female agent doing $3 to $5 million, or a mom staring at a license course wondering if you’re crazy, read Tessa’s story one more time. She didn’t start with money. She didn’t start with a sphere full of buyers or a personal brand. She started with $19, a decision, and the right room.

The decision part has to be yours. The room part, I can help with.

Wanna see what betting on yourself looks like from the inside? Schedule a call and let’s find out if we’re a fit.

Watch my full conversation with Tessa Poyner on The Powerhouse Effect: https://youtu.be/p5KojK5VpEs. And if this one hit home, send it to one mom who’s been waiting for permission. That’s how we grow this community. ⚡