Laid Off Mom to Full Time Multifamily Investor- Build the Streams Early!

A decade in corporate biotech, a father's diagnosis, and a layoff that became the push to build an all-female general partner team in multifamily real estate.

Addie spent over a decade building a career in corporate biotech. She liked it, for a while. Then a layoff in 2024 turned into what she now calls "the biggest blessing in disguise" — the push that took her from owning a handful of single-family rentals on the side to leading her first 11-unit multifamily syndication with eight investors.

A Wake-Up Call From Her Father's Diagnosis

Addie's path into real estate didn't start with a podcast or a book, though those came later. It started with watching her father, who had spent his whole career working a corporate job, develop a neurological condition that left him unable to work. Her mother now works full-time while also caring for him.

"You work your whole life hoping to stay healthy enough to enjoy retirement, but it doesn't always work out that way."

That reality, combined with an entrepreneurial in-law family that had always been involved in real estate, pushed Addie and her husband to start investing on the side back in 2019.

Starting Small While Still in Corporate

Like most new investors, Addie started with single-family homes — properties in San Diego, Michigan, and elsewhere — built up gradually while she kept her full-time biotech job. By the time she was laid off in 2024, she had four to five properties generating a cash cushion most people don't have when they consider leaving a stable paycheck behind. It didn't replace her income, but it gave her room to make a real decision instead of a panicked one.

The Co-op Preschool Moment

One moment crystallized just how little flexibility her corporate career actually offered. Addie asked her employer for permission to volunteer three hours a week at her son's co-op preschool — a small, unpaid commitment to her own child's classroom. The request was denied, even after she escalated it to a vice president. She did it anyway. The episode made plain something she'd suspected for a while: the corporate ladder she'd climbed for over ten years didn't actually value her as a whole person, just her output.

Getting Laid Off — "The Biggest Blessing in Disguise"

When the layoff came in 2024, part of the same wave of AI-driven cuts hitting much of the tech and biotech industry, Addie didn't fight to get back in. She calls it the moment that forced her to think outside the box she'd been operating in for a decade.

"You're just a number. Corporate doesn't have your back."

Rather than searching for her next W-2, she went all in on real estate and enrolled in a coaching program to make the leap from passive landlord to active investor.

Why Single-Family Wasn't Enough

Single-family rentals had gotten Addie started, but by her own admission, they weren't making a dent. Each property meant relying on one roof and one tenant, with risk concentrated rather than spread out. Multifamily investing offered something different: cash flow and risk spread across many units instead of one, and a business structure — partnership agreements, capital raises, a real profit-and-loss statement — that felt less like passive landlording and more like running a company.

Her First Syndication: From Landlord to Business Owner

That shift led to Addie's first syndication: an 11-unit multifamily deal backed by eight investors. She describes it as the deal that catapulted her real estate career, not because of its size, but because of what it taught her about operating with partners instead of going solo. Her biggest lesson from the deal was the importance of transparent, frequent communication with investors — treating the relationship as a long-term partnership rather than a one-time transaction.

Solving Problems, Not Avoiding Them

Addie is candid that multifamily ownership is, at its core, a problem-solving business. She points to a sewage backup from an upstairs unit as a memorable example — the kind of situation that could spiral into panic without the right team in place. Instead, a trusted property manager and contractor relationship handled it methodically.

"Real estate isn't really my passion. It's the vehicle."

What she actually values is the time and freedom it can buy back, for her and for her family.

Building an All-Female GP Team

Multifamily syndication remains a heavily male, heavily white industry, and Addie is one of relatively few Asian women operating as a general partner in the space. Rather than treat that as a barrier, she's actively building an all-female GP team to prove it's possible — and to give other women a way into deals that doesn't require going it alone. She's candid that progress on that goal has been slower than she'd like, especially while pregnant with her second child, and she's made peace with the timeline sliding into next year rather than forcing it.

Who Do You Want at Your Retirement Party?

Addie's goals for the year ahead are concrete: scale into a larger 30-to-50-unit multifamily property in Indianapolis, keep building her all-female GP team, and form more partnerships so the work feels less solitary.

"It can be lonely to produce alone, so do it with people."

It's a version of a question she and her coach return to often: who do you actually want standing next to you at your retirement party? For Addie, the answer is shaping every deal she does next.

If Addie's path from single-family side hustle to multifamily syndicator sounds like where you want to go, Zen Coast University was built to help investors make exactly that jump — with a community instead of a spreadsheet.