Elaine Wagman

By Connie Adair

When Elaine Wagman’s 16-year-old son Anthony keeps asking, “What are you doing now Mom?” it isn’t with teenaged distain. He’s just curious. After all, in his lifetime, his mother has been a social worker, a counsellor, a mediator and a university student. Most recently, she’s put her varied experience and education to work in her career as a full-time real estate agent, and she models on the side.

Wagman, a broker with Coldwell Banker First Ottawa Realty, started modelling when she was 37. When she tells people she models, many think of runway and high fashion work, but Wagman says she’s a lifestyle model. She has appeared in a variety of print ads, for ScotiaBank, Rona, Reitman’s and The Bay, among others. She has also done background work in commercials and movies. She does some runway work, most recently showing off wedding gowns at the Wedding Palace Bridal Show in Ottawa in January.

Wagman got her first taste of modelling when she was 17 and a group of her basketball buddies were involved in a fashion show. “But I shelved modelling and went to university,” she says. She studied criminology, and then got her bachelor of social work. She worked as a social worker and counsellor for about five years.

Then, after being told she could not have children, she enrolled in law school, wanting a career she could “sink my teeth into because I couldn’t have kids,” she says.

About mid-way through her first year, she was pregnant. She made an appeal to the university and was allowed to take an infant Anthony to school with her while she finished her three-year law degree in four years. “The University of Ottawa is a woman-friendly school,” she says.

Deciding law was too demanding for a mother of a young child, she went back to work in addictions counselling, where she was able to set her own hours. “It was there I got my first taste of flexibility,” she says.

She then put her family mediation certificate from Harvard to use and opened a private practice. She wound up that business when her own personal life started going “awry. I couldn’t be an effective mediator when my own marriage was going south.”

Wagman became a real estate agent in 2006 and is now a broker. She says she has accumulated a lot of skills and knowledge over the years and has found her experience helpful in her real estate career.

She picked a small real estate office because she wanted to be able to call the manager or broker, ask a question and get an answer right away. “I love this office,” she says.

Once she started real estate, she wondered why she didn’t do it sooner. “It offers flexibility for a single parent. I’m my own boss and can use my skills effectively. I always knew I’d be self employed, I just didn’t know in what capacity.”

Her strong negotiation skills, attention to detail and personality are assets she lists in her real estate promotions. Potential clients will read, “She is a Harvard University trained negotiator who will work hard to get the best possible price.”

She sells houses at a variety of price points and because of the number of people who have asked her about commercial real estate, is working to get her ICI licence. She is also honing her acting skills, her goal to expand from print modelling and background work to speaking parts.

“Ottawa doesn’t have a market for full-time models, so this is the perfect complement to my full-time real estate career,” she says. “I love it. The two careers gel with each other. Both are flexible and both are fun.”

She says when she’s wearing her real estate hat, people don’t usually recognize her from her modelling work. But she often gets real estate referrals from people she meets in the modelling world.

Wagman says her colleagues have been very supportive and think it’s great and fun, never being close-minded enough to think her modelling takes away from her full-time real estate career.

“It’s great. If I’m available, I model. But if it’s a busy spring market or a time when I’m doing real estate, I can decline a job and they will call again,” she says. “Real estate comes first.”

When she’s not selling homes or modelling, she says she’s “a half-decent soccer goalkeeper, a ready and willing drumming student, a questionable but enthusiastic skier, a great cyclist as long as someone else carriers the gear and a chauffer to her teenaged son.”

Mostly, she says, she just has fun.