Property Advisor & Partner at Strand Properties | Real Estate Marketer | Change Manager | Lead Generation Specialist | Real Estate Appraiser | Customer Care Executive.
Sari Fairchild has spent her career moving between worlds that, on paper, have nothing to do with each other: commercial aviation, executive search, and now luxury property on the Costa del Sol. What connects them is not industry knowledge. It is an unusual comfort with starting over, and a conviction that the fundamentals of any serious decision, whether it involves an airline route network, a candidate for a boardroom, or a family relocating their whole life, are the same.
A Route That Started in Johannesburg
Sari is Finnish by birth, but she has a truly international background. As a young girl, she spent 15 years in South Africa, a country that, like Finland, will always feel like home. She graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a degree in International Relations and Political Studies. A world away from Helsinki and Marbella.
She moved back to Finland in 1995, and aviation found her two years later, when she joined Finnair. Corporate agreements. Alliance-level negotiations. A CRM system rolled out across an international business. Three years running the company’s operations in Denmark from Copenhagen, where she was also the public face of the airline to the Danish press.
After thirteen years at Finnair, she made the first of several deliberate leaps. While recruiting for a global sales role, she found herself in conversation with an executive search consultant in Helsinki and decided she wanted the consultant’s job instead.
Seven Years Deciding Who Gets to Lead
Seven years followed at two different companies, running executive searches and management audits for senior leadership positions. She earned an Executive MBA at Aalto University along the way, along with a personality assessment certification, sharpening a skill she would carry into every industry after: understanding people, reading what they actually want, often before they can articulate it themselves.
It also gave her a belief that has anchored every transition since. Fundamentally, all companies, regardless of what they do, operate according to the same principles. That conviction is why moving between sectors has never frightened her.
Running Strategy Through Aviation’s Worst Crisis
Restless with repeating a near-identical process on every search assignment, she returned to Finnair in 2018 to head the home market and global strategic accounts, and walked directly into the worst crisis civil aviation has ever faced, Covid 19. First China, then one destination after another was cancelled, until only a handful of routes and frequencies remained. Then Russia’s attack on Ukraine closed the airspace, tearing up an Asia strategy built entirely on overflying Russian territory.
Evaluating success in those years meant something narrower than usual: controlling what was within her control, in an environment defined by what wasn’t. It was a fitting final chapter to nineteen years spent moving people across borders, one that tested every skill she’d built, right as the industry itself was being rewritten.
A Sabbatical, and a Decision Not to Wait
Her parents had already relocated to Spain. Her mother’s health was declining. Her two daughters were grown. She took a sabbatical, and it did what sabbaticals are meant to do. I did not want to wait until retirement. I wanted to live my dream now. It is a decision she now argues anyone with decades of corporate life behind them has earned the right to make.
She had followed the Costa del Sol property market for years, watching international capital arrive faster than supply could answer it. In January 2026, she founded Fairchild Estates S.L. By May, she had partnered with Strand Properties in Marbella, a firm she chose deliberately for its reputation,values and focus on premium property
Changing direction after twenty-five years is not really about the industry. It’s about deciding you’re still willing to be a beginner.
What International Buyers Are Actually Deciding
Her clients now arrive from across Europe and beyond, and almost none of them fit the old picture of the Costa del Sol buyer. The idea that this is a retiree paradise is very outdated. Entrepreneurs, remote workers and their families relocate permanently not only for the great climate, but also for the schools, the healthcare, the connectivity. The differences between buyers matter enormously. A family moving for good may need to be near a school rather than a beach. A frequent traveller needs the airport, not the promenade. Although life in Spain, in her opinion, is pretty amazing, permanent life in Spain is not a permanent holiday, and she says so before anyone signs anything.
Seven years of executive assessment left her with an instinct she trusts completely. My years in executive search made me a good people reader. She can tell within a conversation whether a buyer has a real budget and a real decision behind them, or is simply enjoying the view, and she is direct about her refusal to waste a serious client’s weekend on properties that were never going to work.
That instinct also means knowing when to walk away. It’s a small, unremarkable part of the job to her: due diligence is not an obstacle to a deal, it’s what makes a deal worth doing. This is why she insists every buyer and seller should both have an expert agent and a lawyer of their own.
What the Sky Teaches You About the Ground
In a commission business, the easiest thing in the world is silence: sign the papers, collect the fee, and let the lawyers handle whatever comes after. Sari Fairchild has built her career on relationships that outlast a single negotiation, first with global corporate accounts and numerous international stakeholders, then with executives whose futures depended on her judgment, and she brought that same arithmetic with her to the Costa del Sol.
An airline taught her that you cannot control the sky. You can only control what you tell the person sitting across from you. On the Costa del Sol, that same principle now guides how she works with sellers, buyers, and investors alike, each one facing a different decision, all of them needing someone straightforward on the other side of the table.
Sari Fairchild, Executive MBA, is a Property Advisor and Partner at Strand Properties in Marbella, operating through her own company, Fairchild Estates S.L., based in the Greater Marbella Metropolitan Area. She advises international buyers on second homes, investment purchases and permanent relocation across the Costa del Sol. To connect with Sari or learn more, visit her LinkedIn Profile or https://strandproperties.com/
