Source: Insider —
Before she was a successful real-estate agent closing on nearly $28 million in deals in 2022, Lily Jang was a news anchor for KHOU-TV in Houston.
She never would’ve left the broadcasting world, she told Insider, had the TV station not gone through a management change and subsequent layoffs.
“You always know in the back of your head this could happen: New management comes in, and they’re going to clean house, and you could be a casualty — and that’s exactly what happened to me,” she said.
The blow was especially difficult for her because one of the main reasons she moved to Houston was to take care of her aging parents, especially her father, who has Parkinson’s disease. Unlike other broadcasters who could pick up and move to another city for a job, Jang needed to stay and take care of her family.
“That was the most devastating time in my life. Anybody else would’ve springboarded to Chicago, New York, LA, or Miami, but I couldn’t,” Jang, who had worked in other states before moving to Texas, said. “I sat in a corner and cried for two weeks, but I said to myself, ‘I’m going to have to pivot. I have to figure this out.'”
And figure it out she did — by the end of her first year at Keller Williams, she’d closed $8 million in real-estate transactions and surpassed her salary as a news anchor. In 2021, four years after she got her start, she made nearly $900,000 in gross earnings.
“I took my profession as a news anchor, my marketing skills, and leveraged everything I had and who I was, and I used that in real estate,” Jang said. “I built my journalism career on relationships, communication, and integrity, and I parlayed all that into my new career pretty seamlessly.”
Here’s how she built a business that’s thrived through social media and organic marketing.
Making the pivot
Jang’s interest in real estate was spurred by her experiences shopping for homes.
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