2022 Women in Commercial Real Estate: Viktoria Alkova, Coastal Land & Commercial Group at Keller Williams Coastal Realty

What has been your biggest challenge and how have you faced it? There definitely were plenty of challenges in the beginning. To put things in perspective, I was raised in Russia and grew up in a family of business-owners and was involved in running multiple businesses my parents had in day-to-day life. I’ve been surrounded by highly productive, self-employed individuals for as long as I can remember. The idea of becoming an employee, making fixed amount of money every month, not being able to control my own schedule would have been bizarre and did not apply to real life the way I wanted to live. When I came here to the US, there was no hesitation in getting into real estate, which almost felt unavoidable considering my background. From there on I had to work on the language barrier, it also took me two times of going to real estate school to pass the exam.

Are you part of any CRE organizations? How have they helped your professional development? I did get extremely lucky on the terms, arrangements, support and education with my team and brokerage, which all been essential elements to get going and be very productive. The team approach has been extremely helpful and saved a lot of time. Their continuous efforts and persistence helped me at every step of the way. As Elbert Hubbard said: “A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success”.