My storyI spent part of third grade in Mariposa. Nearly sixty years later, I sell real estate there.

I was born in South Korea in 1958 and adopted at two and a half by Lloyd and Lois Jean Sharp. We lived in the States until I was five, then moved back to Korea as expats — I did first and second grade there. We came home, and my parents divorced during my third-grade year. Part of that year I lived with an aunt and uncle in Mariposa.

That’s the entire coincidence. I’m not going to dress it up as destiny. It was part of one school year during a bad stretch, and then I grew up elsewhere, graduated from Merced High School, and didn’t think about it again for most of my life.

But I do sell houses in Mariposa County now. Make of it what you like.

At 68, I found family I didn’t know I had — a niece and nephew on my father’s side. Here’s that story.

I spent 38 years in high tech — product marketing and sales at Dell, Western Digital, Philips, and Maxtor, plus a stretch running my own consultancy. I built and led the product marketing and sales organization at Ravisent Technologies through its IPO, and ran marketing and sales at InterActual before Sonic Solutions acquired it. Along the way I worked sales cycles on contracts exceeding $200 million.

What that leaves me with, in a form that’s useful to you: I’m comfortable with a spreadsheet, I don’t get emotional about a deal, and I’ve spent decades across the table from people whose entire job was to win the negotiation. None of it is glamorous. All of it shows up when we’re arguing about a repair credit.

My wife Teresa and I lived in Yokohama from 2012 to 2016. When you’re an expat in Japan, everyone you’ve ever met comes to visit. Four years of that gave us a taste for hosting, and we started saying when we go home, let’s do Airbnb.

So when we came back, we didn’t move to the Bay Area. We moved to the mountains, where we’d planned to retire eventually, and bought a house that happened to have an Airbnb apartment on the ground floor. We started hosting in 2016. I commuted to the Bay Area for work for a few more years, but that was the decision.

We’ve been Superhosts for ten years. We added Mariposa, then San Antonio, Texas.

I retired from tech and needed something to do. Teresa suggested real estate. I got licensed in April 2021 and joined Courtney Twiss’s independent brokerage locally. When she moved to eXp in November 2024 I went with her, and in April 2025 I started my own team there — Sharp Mountain Homes Team.

My first client was a friend with forty years in Bay Area real estate who wanted a vacation rental up here. He was an agent himself and he still wanted me to represent him. That told me something about what I actually knew.

The first four years ran about ten transactions a year, a mix of everything. In year five I stopped doing a mix. I picked short-term rental investors and built everything around that audience — the YouTube channel, the analysis tools, the vendor network.

The reasoning wasn’t complicated. Every agent up here has done some short-term rental business. Very few have done it as an owner. You can’t beat someone who’s been selling this county for fifty years on general real estate — so find the thing you can honestly say you’re the best at, and go be that.

People ask why one of my three rentals is nowhere near Yosemite.

Because I wanted to know what it’s like to own a short-term rental in a place I don’t live. That’s the position every one of my Bay Area clients is in. I wasn’t going to advise them on a problem I’d never had.

What all three actually make, and what I gave up →