By Living Room Realty, March 23, 2022
In the arc of my Real Estate career I’ve found a pattern: I sell a house to a young couple that they live in until they have a second child. Then they trade up for a bigger one. Soon after that I usually get a call from the Grandparents who’d like to move here from the Mid-West, East-Coast or California somewhere. It is always a process to get the Grandparents here often because they’ve been in their current house for decades and are pretty dug into their community. And there is the practical matter of dealing with a fast-moving market from thousands of miles away.
This next story is so gangster that I’m not going to name any names. Some my best clients, who can be described as the adult children in this scenario, approached me in 2019 or so about moving the wife’s parents to Portland at some point in the next few years. They had some real estate in the Bay Area to sell first before getting serious about the move; then they would be cash buyers. We met once in 2020 to tour a home when they were in town and then again around Christmas, 2021 to get serious.
There was one statement that came up in the second meeting that I put a pin in as a talking point: “we are in no rush and are happy to wait for the perfect house”. The criteria for the search was pretty simple: one level and walking distance to the Grandkids. In two years of casual searching there had been a handful of properties that might have worked. When our search began in earnest, it was clear to me that it was going to be a challenge. Not necessarily to find the house, but to get the buyers up to speed, in short order, from 600+ miles away.
I sent out a preemptive email in an attempt to spark a family conversation about adding some urgency to this process so everyone could enjoy each others company sooner rather than later. Sure enough, a week or so later, the perfect house came up. Listed at $850k; when I pulled up my first thought was: my goodness, somebody is gonna pay a million for this place. Little did I know it would be my clients. It was 70’s style and needed some updating, but was one level, well maintained, had a great floorplan and dynamite location.
We did a video call with the Grandparents and got the thumbs up to write an offer. Long story short, my clients beat out 4 other offers without even setting foot inside the house. The inspection period was 6 days and we had the sale closed in less than 10 days. Now the kids will get to experience the gift of Grandparents just around the corner. And a certain son-in-law will get to play general contractor for a few months to get the place updated a little.
