If REALTOR® Erin Feist of Intero Realty’s Joe Valesco Group were a puzzle, there would be lots of pieces — some found only in the last few years by research or chance.

Adopted from her native South Korea by an American family when she was 7 months old, Erin bounced from country to country growing up. She’s demure but also a competitive bodybuilder. Starting life with one family, she now has two.

“Moving around is hard on any child, especially during their grade school and teenage years,” she says of the family’s many moves as they followed her Mom’s career as a semiconductor engineer.

Austin, TX, Germany and Santa Cruz were some of the places she and her three brothers lived growing up.

“As hard as it was on me then, now as an adult I appreciate having had the challenge. It’s made me more culturally aware and curious; it’s given me perspective and the gift of perseverance.”

She’s quickly found success in her new career as a REALTOR®, with a volume of $20 million in her first year in 2022 (top 10% in Santa Clara County) and is already topping that this year with more than $25 million year-to-date.

Her move to real estate came after a decade of success in finance and private banking. 

“I started to feel unfulfilled and felt like I was no longer developing new skills,” she says. Right before COVID, she switched careers and briefly worked as the estate manager for a family in Los Altos Hills.

“It was a short job but I quickly learned the personal fulfillment that comes from having a positive impact on people’s lives,” she says, setting the stage for a real estate career.

But first COVID came along.

“The quarantine was tough for me as an extrovert,” Erin says. Like so many around the world, she began to struggle with anxiety and depression. “Being alone during COVID forced me to self-reflect and really helped me understand myself better,” she says. “I managed to pull myself out of depression and gained a newfound determination. Afterward, I won my first bodybuilding show and started my real estate career.”

Her interest in bodybuilding grew from her love of weightlifting that developed after a 2018 resolution to lose weight and get fit. “It’s an important stress outlet for me and makes me feel more confident,” Erin says.

Even before COVID, she had a growing curiosity about her health history and started searching for her birth mother, ultimately discovering birth-family members she never knew existed.

Her search started using a beta version of 23andMe genetic testing for health and ancestry. “When I got the results back, it said I was 100% Asian,” she says, but otherwise didn’t seem to provide any useful information.

Her parents gave her a few documents from the adoption agency with a few small pieces of information about her birth family. Erin contacted the agency only to find there was only a 2 percent chance her search would be successful.

Then in 2017, she got a letter from her birth mother and flew to Korea to meet her birth family for the first time — three sisters and two brothers.

With Erin not speaking Korean and her birth family not speaking English, she hired a translator that first visit but says subsequent meetings have been capably facilitated by Google Translate.

That might have been the end of the story but then a Minnesota woman responded to an Instagram post of Erin’s. “She said, ‘I don’t know if you did a 23andMe test or if this is the right Feist, but if it is, I just matched with you as my sister on 23andMe.’”

In her first letter, her birth mother had also given the briefest descriptions of her other siblings, including one of whom Erin was unaware. All she knew was the town he lived in and that he played the cello.

“So I went on to Facebook and searched the name in the city and there were hundreds of matches because it’s such a common name.” Then scrolling through those hundreds of matches, she saw one profile picture of a man with a cello. It was indeed her brother. She messaged him and the two have now been reunited.

“Adoption is something that’s close to my heart,” she says. “One day I hope to be a mom and there’s nothing special about me or my bloodline that I need to pass on. Adopting children is definitely something that’s high on my list.”

If Erin Feist were a puzzle there would be plenty of pieces that when put together reveal a woman with the skills and personality to shoot to the top of her profession and a very large and caring heart.