ALL ABOUT MARK!
FROM BASEBALL, TO TRAVEL, TO COLLEGE, TO TRAVEL, TO REAL ESTATE, THEN BACK TO TRAVEL.
When I was growing up, my mother and I would play a little game, memorizing the capitals of all the states in the U.S., and the capitals of all the countries in the world. I had a globe that I would spin and spend hours staring at all the faraway places I would go some day. Later in high school, I was developing as an athlete and, like so many American boys, I wanted to be a professional baseball player. My father was a musician, and even though I excelled on the trumpet from a very young age, it was baseball that had my heart at that time.
My mother, a second generation San Francisco North Beach Italian, lost her battle with cancer when I was 13, and an injury in college cut my pitching career short. This forced me to revisit my dream, so I promptly joined the Navy, which took me to my first country out of the US, Malaysia. Little did I know then that I would some day meet my future wife, who is from Malaysia. For four glorious years I sailed all around the globe several times, from Thailand, to Australia, to the Middle East, searching to find my way forward.
Besides being a great adventure, the Navy also enabled me to go to college, where I landed at the University of Washington and studied American History. During this time, I bartended through college at West Seattle Golf Course, and I travelled all through the United States in my spare time, developing a love of New York, Miami, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and of course the city where I was born, San Francisco.
After college, armed with my Bachelors degree, I started selling cars while I was thinking about what I wanted to do as a career. I was a quick study in sales, and was immediately recruited to an RV dealership. Selling RV’s was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the business tremendously for the four years I worked and excelled for Dan Gamel and Poulsbo RV. Ultimately, I moved on to Real Estate, where I finally found my chosen career, representing buyers and sellers from Seattle to San Francisco. In 2011, I launched my own Real Estate investment company with my wife called Little Green Houses. The mission of the company has been to build sustainable wealth through real estate, investing in homes from Florida to Detroit, New Orleans, Las Vegas and all over California.
Along the way, I would reignite my love of baseball, coaching for high schools in Seattle and San Francisco, and occasionally moonlighting as a baseball writer, covering the San Francisco Giants and San Francisco 49ers for Bleacher Report and Valley Bay News. I also made it a personal goal to go to every baseball stadium in the US. With my wife as my running partner, whenever we travel, we catch live sports and live music, from football to festivals, and more.
For a while, we were just moving around the US, as my wife’s corporate job would take us to South Florida and Southern California. Our real estate company enabled me to work from anywhere, and when the opportunity came for us to go to Singapore, I relinquished working in real estate for clients, and focused solely on the company as we started a new chapter in our lives.
Now, instead of writing about baseball, I write about our travels for International Living and our travel journal Shrug Life. I am also immersed in learning Spanish, Italian, and Malay, in addition to picking up my trumpet again and playing wherever we travel. Coming soon to a concert near you!
(CEO) Chief Entertainment Officer
MarkProbst@Shruglife.net
