We just finished a move just one month shy of the first anniversary of the COVID19 pandemic. We had to sell our old home, move, and settle in to a new community at a time when people are even avoiding their own families. It was our hardest move including the time when we moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Columbia, Maryland, and had to deal with a border crossing. We were still in our thirties when we did that move. We are now in our early seventies.
Certainly being older had an impact on this move but when we moved in 1987, there was no Internet. We did not have cell phones. The only way to see a house was to get into a car and visit it or wait for snail mail pictures. We carried prepaid long-distance phone cards to communicate when traveling. You could not find things out by going to a website. In the eighties, there were no websites. You either had to write a letter or pick up the telephone.
One of the underlying reasons that we were able to make this move is that a massive amount of new technology now underlies most of the business processes involved in a move. Sure there is still a lot of manual labor involved but during a pandemic, I seriously doubt you could buy a house without all of today’s remarkable technology.
We learned a lot with this move and I am not going to try to cram it all into one blog post. I suspect it will take at least two or three posts. For this first post, I am going to cover deciding where to live and buying our new home. I will probably do a post on selling our home and another on the actual move.
First just a little background, this is our seventh move as a couple. We did one corporate move and the rest we have done ourselves. My wife and I had 200 head of Black and Red Angus cattle on our farm in central New Brunswick in Canada. After dispersing our herd of cattle, I eventually went to work for Apple Computer after a two-year stint at an early computer reseller.
We moved from the farm in December 1984 and I worked for Apple in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then Columbia, Maryland. Finally, we lived in Roanoke, Virginia, while I worked out of the Reston, Virginia office where I became Apple’s director of federal sales. I worked for Apple for almost twenty years until July 2004. I did some consulting and spent some time at a couple of other companies before trying real estate for a few years. I went back to my technology roots in 2011 and continue to work as a Vice President for that same company that builds community fiber networks.
I have been faced with figuring out where to live in unfamiliar areas several times. The one element which can make or break finding the right place to live is establishing a relationship with a realtor who knows the area where you have decided to live. In each move where we found a good home, there was a realtor who helped us make the right decisions. We have been fortunate to work with some great realtors.
Purely by chance when we started looking at places to live, we lucked into signing a buyer’s agreement with a great Realtor, Carrie Gibson of Mays-Gibson Real Estate.
I am a big believer in test-driving cars and real estate agents. In the early stages of moving, we saw a house listed that interested us. We emailed Shelia Mays, the listing agent, asking some questions in early January 2019. Before she had a chance to answer, a personal emergency happened and we ended up working with Carrie Gibson. It was a very fortuitous accident that made all the difference in finding a house in the right place that came as close as possible to meeting our needs.
Carrie was everything we could ask for in a buyer’s agent, knowledgeable, personable, caring, persistent, a good listener, patient, and a great communicator. I am convinced that our move would have been far more stressful and less successful without Carrie’s expertise. Moving at any time is difficult especially when you are in your seventies. Moving during a pandemic is a huge hurdle and Carrie Gibson made our move possible. We bought our home twenty-five months after we first talked to Carrie. Carrie is the best buyers' agent that has ever helped us and we have worked with a couple of stars.
While we ended up buying a place less than twenty miles from where I grew up in the fifties, the growth in the area makes it almost unrecognizable. My memory has to stretch to accommodate all the changes.
We made a trip to the area in the spring of 2019 to decide on areas where we might want to live. Carrie showed us around the area and gave us a good feel for where we might want to live. We actually tried to pick our area out before we put our home on the market for the first time. Because we were selling a waterfront home after Hurricane Florence paid a devastating visit to NC’s Crystal Coast, it took longer than expected. In fact, as the pandemic started to rage, we took our home off the market in the summer of 2020. We put our back on the market in the fall of 2021, that time it sold in thirty-seven days. Carrie never stopped communicating with us or treated us like we were taking too long to buy.
When our home sold in early November, we had to buy a home and we needed to buy it before Thanksgiving. Carrie had been in the loop of the selling of our home and was prepared for us but it was still hard to absorb how fast homes were selling at the time. In the middle of the summer, we had sixty homes on our potential list. By early November, the number was down to a dozen. By the time we got in the car to make the four-hour drive to go look at homes, there were only eight homes left on the list. When we got up the next morning, we were down to six homes.
Carrie lined up the homes on a Thursday and after taking a second look at two homes, we made an offer Friday afternoon on a home about the same age, fourteen years, as our current home. The owner countered with a full-price offer. We upped our offer another $5K and when we got no response, we withdrew our second offer. We decided to buy one of the other two homes.
Saturday we had a close look at both homes. We rejected one because of poor cell phone reception, lousy Internet connectivity, and its location where we would have endured several homes being built nearby.
We ended up buying a beautiful spec home that we had initially rejected because of vaulting in the living room. It has Fiber to the Home for Internet connectivity, is on public sewer and water, plus the lot gives us the feeling of spaciousness. We feel like we live in the country but new construction is done on our street. Our home has 2,400 square feet home compared to our recent coastal home's 3600 square ft so we have down-sized like we wanted to do.
There were significant negotiations with the builder and Carrie’s expertise helped those go smoothly. She did a great job writing up the final contract. We also had a challenging closing because we didn’t receive the money from our closing until Monday before our 9:30 AM closing the next day. Once again Carrie smoothed out things on that end while our real estate agent at the coast, Don Whiteside, went above and beyond the call of duty to get us a check that would work for our next day's closing. I will talk more about Don when I write the article about selling our home.
Carrie also played a big role in helping us get settled but that too deserves its own article. When I did the walkthrough with Carrie and my son the week before closing, Carrie was on top of everything just as she was when we negotiated the finishing of the house.
We are living in what I consider to the perfect location in a very well-constructed home. We live in a quiet countryside area less than ten minutes from Mocksville’s quaint small-town charm and impressive services. We are fifteen minutes from just about any service that you could imagine in Clemmons and only twenty to twenty-five from everything else including Trader Joe’s and Costco which were an hour and a half from our coastal location.
The story of our new phones illustrates how much closer we are to civilization. Somehow during the move, some pieces of our previous Panasonic phone system went missing. I looked online and it was two days for an Amazon delivery. I checked Costco thinking I might drive in and pick up a system. They had a four-handset system for $79. While looking, I noticed they would deliver. So I started shopping and while doing that figured out I could add groceries. I placed my order which included a famous Costco rotisserie chicken, some of my favorite Canadian bacon, some beef sausages, the largest bag of Cape Cod chips that I have ever seen, and 40 lbs of cat litter. An hour and nine minutes after hitting submit, I am watching the Costco shopper/delivery person back out of our driveway. The chicken was still warm and required tasting.
We are very happy with our new home, its location, and our experience of buying and selling homes. We acquired a great home at a fair price which is something we cannot say about every one of our other moves. While lots of new technology helped us buy our new home. I cannot emphasize how important a role our agent, Carrie Gibson, played in the success of this whole operation.
David - So good to hear from you again. . . I kept checking weekly for a writeup or two. . . congratulations on your recent move. . glad to hear all is good. . .and what a catch on the Realtor!! Things are still treading along here in the Star City. . . I'm glad the beach is only a few hours away! Looking forward to your next column! Peace! Richard
Posted by: Richard Provolone | March 01, 2021 at 08:24 PM