About Tim & Sophia Eng
Tim and Sophia Eng are The Homesteading Agent team, a husband and wife who sell real estate and make home loans for families moving to the country. In 2022 they left the San Francisco Bay Area for a nearly 60-acre homestead in Tennessee, where they raise cattle, sheep, ducks, and chickens.
Tim is a West Point graduate and Army combat veteran. Sophia has been in real estate and mortgage lending since 2006. They can find the property and finance it anywhere in the country,* and they can tell you what living on it is like, because they do it every day.
Meet the Team
REALTOR® · Loan Originator · Life Insurance Producer
REALTOR® · Loan Originator · Tech Director
Meet Tim
Tim grew up in San Jose, graduated from West Point in 2005, and served 16 years as an Army combat engineer officer. During an 18-month deployment to Iraq in 2007 and 2008, he earned the Bronze Star Medal and the Combat Action Badge. His mission there was to bring every one of his soldiers home, and he did.
In 2018 he started selling real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area with Compass and Sotheby’s, working as a top-producing team with Sophia. He saw it as the same mission he had in the Army: bringing people home.
When the family moved to Tennessee in 2022, he rebranded as The Homesteading Agent. He sells real estate and originates loans nationwide.* He also holds a life insurance producer license, because buying the land is only part of the job. He wants his clients’ assets secured and their families protected, which is where the brand line comes from: find, finance and secure your homestead.
Tim is also a certified permaculture farmer, and he trained under Chris Trump in Hawaii as a Soilsmith, a practitioner of Chris’s Natural Farming methods. When he walks a property, he’s reading the soil as closely as the survey.
The Army trained him to plan for what can go wrong, and he walks every property that way. He wants to know where the water comes from and whether the road holds up in a wet February before you fall in love with the kitchen. That same habit is why he wrote FM 5-21: Fortify Your Farm, a field-manual-style guide to securing a homestead.
Meet Sophia
Sophia Nguyen Eng has worked in real estate and mortgage lending since 2006, starting in the Bay Area. She’s also Director of Growth at the startup Journify, after leading growth initiatives at Workday, Autodesk, Smartsheet, and InVision, and she still splits her time between Silicon Valley and the homestead. When a tech founder or executive calls us about buying land, they’re talking to someone who knows their world.
A first-generation Vietnamese American, Sophia grew up in a multigenerational household where cooking and farming were how the family took care of each other. She’s a bestselling, award-winning author: The Nourishing Asian Kitchen won a Foreword INDIES award in 2023, and she co-wrote The Nourishing Asian Homestead with Tim.
Sophia has always been a critical thinker. She loved science growing up and was on the pre-med track, and that path kept leading her back to one question: what does it mean to be healthy? She went on to earn a master’s degree in clinical psychology. Studying how people think taught her why people buy, and that understanding carried her into a career in marketing, working for startups and Fortune 500 tech companies in Silicon Valley. Life as an entrepreneur taught her to think fast and get creative with whatever resources are on hand, and it turns out a homestead asks for exactly the same skills.
When she and Tim had their first daughter, the question about health moved into the kitchen. They started buying organic food, and over time they came to understand that food is medicine.
She’s a certified Korean Natural Farming instructor and an international keynote speaker. She has presented at Ferment Oaxaca in Mexico and the Wise Traditions Conference, and she shared the stage with Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm. She has also spoken at Google headquarters about her cookbook.
On the family blog, Sprinkle With Soil, she writes about the family’s life on the land, from raising kids to tending livestock.
Our Homestead
We raise beef and dairy cattle, sheep, ducks, and chickens. Between the animals and the garden, we grow all of our own protein and most of our vegetables.
You don’t need 60 acres to homestead, and most of our clients don’t want it. For one family it’s a condo with a container garden on the patio. For another it’s a backyard with six laying hens, or 40 acres and a barn. We start by asking what you want your days to look like, then find the property and the loan that fit.
Books, Podcast & Speaking
Sophia Nguyen Eng & Timothy Eng · Chelsea Green · October 2026
How our family left the Bay Area, regenerated our land, and built a homestead around the food traditions our families brought to this country. Foreword by Joel Salatin.
Pre-order →Timothy Eng
A practical guide to securing your homestead, written in the style of an Army field manual.
Get the book →Sophia Nguyen Eng · Foreword INDIES 2023
Sophia’s cookbook of her mother’s family recipes, written down so her daughters would have them.
Timothy Eng · Lyons Press · October 2027
Tim’s guide to finding and evaluating land, from water and access to financing. Coming in fall 2027.
Tim and Sophia founded the Call To Farms podcast and membership community with a goal of saving 10,000 one-acre farms across America. On the podcast they talk with families who made the move and share housing market updates. Members take online classes and hands-on training in the recipes and farming methods from both books, from food preservation to building soil.
Tim and Sophia give family keynotes at homesteading conferences. Sophia also speaks internationally, from Ferment Oaxaca in Mexico to the Wise Traditions Conference. Tim consults with families planning their own move from the city. For speaking requests, email tim@homesteadingagent.com.
Questions
Tim Eng is The Homesteading Agent. He graduated from West Point in 2005, served 16 years as an Army combat engineer officer, and earned the Bronze Star Medal in Iraq. Today he sells real estate and originates mortgage loans nationwide. He is a certified permaculture farmer and a Soilsmith trained by Chris Trump in Natural Farming. He and his wife Sophia live on a nearly 60-acre homestead in Tennessee and co-host the Call To Farms podcast.
Sophia Nguyen Eng has worked in real estate and mortgage lending since 2006. She is a bestselling, award-winning author of The Nourishing Asian Kitchen (Foreword INDIES 2023), co-author of The Nourishing Asian Homestead with Tim, a certified Korean Natural Farming instructor, and an international keynote speaker. She is also Director of Growth at Journify and previously led growth initiatives at Workday, Autodesk, Smartsheet, and InVision.
Tim holds real estate licenses in Tennessee, California, and Virginia. He originates mortgage loans in 49 states and Washington, DC, everywhere except New York (NMLS #2640774). In states where he does not hold a real estate license, he refers clients to a vetted local agent and still handles the loan.
No. Tim and Sophia work with buyers of condos, suburban homes, and land alike. For some families a homestead is a backyard with a garden and a few laying hens; for others it is 40 acres and a barn. The loan side covers any residential property.
Book a call with Tim to talk through your budget and where you want to live, or start a pre-approval online. You can work with the team on the home, the loan, or both.
Licenses
Ready When You Are
Book a call with Tim and talk through your budget and where you want to live. Work with us on the home, the loan, or both.