In San Francisco, a Gallerist Followed Her Heart to a New Apartment for Around $1 Million

If her parents had had their way, Sierra Nguyen might still be training to become an anesthesiologist.

The child of Vietnamese refugees who escaped after the fall of Saigon, Ms. Nguyen grew up in Martinez, a small city in Northern California. She excelled in the sciences and got a scholarship to Saint Mary’s College of California, where an act of filial disobedience set her on an unexpected course.

After years of grueling labs, she began studying for medical school exams. But one day she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror holding one of the thick textbooks.

The first thought she had: “I don’t want to do this.”

The second came in the form of a poem by the Sufi mystic Rumi, which she had studied in high school: “Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

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“And so I did a complete 180, broke my parents’ hearts and, as clichéd as it sounds, I followed my own,” she said. “And I found myself at an art gallery.”

So Ms. Nguyen, now 28, became an assistant at a gallery in San Francisco, a job that involved vacuuming, changing printer cartridges and getting salads for her boss, for $15 an hour in the beginning. She struggled to pay her rent, much less save enough for a down payment on a home in a city where the typical two-bedroom condominium goes for $1.2 million, according to Zillow.

But her gamble paid off: She landed a job at Dolby Chadwick Gallery. She had been there mere months when the pandemic shut down the city, and the world. Into that void, the gallery owner and her new hire began a collaboration — a daily email to the gallery’s listserv that paired a poem and an artwork from the gallery’s inventory. Sales went through the roof.

Ms. Nguyen was promoted to gallery manager, and then associate director and, finally, director, a position that came with a percentage of the art she sold. As the years passed, she managed to set aside about $230,000 for a home purchase. Even then, it was unclear what, if anything, she could afford to buy.

Last fall, she called Pattie Lawton, an agent with Sotheby’s International Realty, and sheepishly asked if she might be able to find a two-bedroom in San Francisco with an $850,000 budget — about $350,000 less than the median price of a two-bedroom.

Ms. Lawton showed up with pink streaks in her hair and a can-do attitude. The properties she suggested included condominiums as well as tenancy-in-common listings, or T.I.C., a kind of group homeownership that is common in San Francisco and more affordable, but comes with added risk.

With a T.I.C., a group of people — either friends or strangers — enter into an agreement to buy a property. They share the legal title, and the agreement spells out the percentage of the building that each has the exclusive right to use. (This arrangement differs from that of a cooperative, where residents own shares in a private corporation that, in turns, owns and manages the building.)

Andy Sirkin, a lawyer whose firm, SirkinLaw APC, focuses on real estate co-ownership, said that a T.I.C. is “like a marriage,” whereby multiple owners share a single parcel of undivided property. The city sends a single property tax bill to the building, and it’s up to the owners to divvy it up.

“There are more shared obligations in a T.I.C. than in a condo,” Mr. Sirkin said. “That raises the level of risk.”

When this form of ownership was created, the owners also shared a group mortgage, so if one party stopped paying, the others were on the hook for those payments. But beginning in the 2000s, a form of financing known as a fractional mortgage allowed buyers to obtain separate mortgages on a fraction of a T.I.C. building, making it possible for someone like Ms. Nguyen to get an individual mortgage, which mitigates the risk somewhat.

As Ms. Nguyen began her search, her parents took the $200,000 they had saved for her college education — money she didn’t need, thanks to the scholarships she had earned — and put it toward her down payment, increasing it to $430,000.

Among her options:

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