Episode 8: We Moved Across the Country During the Pandemic. Here’s How (and Why) Pt. 7
In July 2020, we bought a house over FaceTime.
We did not, as the Phrase of the Year goes, have that on our 2020 bingo card. The house was 2,000 miles away in a town we had rarely visited, on a road we weren’t sure how to pronounce, in a neighborhood we didn’t know. But by July of 2020, when the world’s idea of “normal” had already been redefined, making the biggest investment of our lives through a small, handheld video screen seemed like perfectly rational and sensible behavior.
Buying a house over a smartphone may sound stupid, but it was the best option given the time crunch created by the sale of our house in Boise and the start of the school year in Hudson, Ohio. We willfully put ourselves in this position, but nonetheless, our time frame was much shorter than we had planned in early 2020 when we initially made the decision to move. Selling our house represented a total commitment, and once we signed the purchase and sale agreement on July 1, there was no turning back. Now we had to find a house in Hudson, and find it fast.
The closing date on our home sale was scheduled for Aug. 7. The first day of the 20-21 academic year at Hudson Middle School was Aug. 31. With those dates etched in our minds, we got to work finding our new home from afar. Fortunately, we had a head start in more ways than one. Not only had my wife, Erica, been researching Hudson – especially the housing market – since the fall of 2019, but my mother happens to be a real estate agent in Ohio. When we called my parents in early June to reveal our moving plans, it was partially to put Mom to work.
Erica and I had started looking at homes even before that call, but we were stuck in a holding pattern until our house in Boise sold. And that meant that the houses we were eying in Hudson were long gone by the time we had a contract, because the housing market in Northeast Ohio was nearly as nuts as it was in Boise. And Hudson, in particular, was bonkers. The town was experiencing a historic shortage of available inventory, and houses were getting scarfed up within days (or hours) of hitting the market. Fresh off the frustration of a home sale that came on full throttle but threatened to stall out, we were now getting a bitter taste of what it meant to be buyers in a highly-competitive market.
Unbeknownst to us, we were part of a growing pandemic trend, that of remote workers moving somewhere quieter and less expensive than the bigger cities they had been inhabiting. And while Boise is starting to look and feel bigger, coloring this as a city-mouse-to-country-mouse move isn’t entirely accurate. Yes, Hudson is a suburb of only 22,000, roughly 10 percent of Boise’s population, but it’s located halfway between Akron and Cleveland in a combined statistical area of 3.5 million people, compared to the Treasure Valley’s 750,000. The key thing was price: Despite Hudson’s distinction as one of the most expensive places to live in Summit County, houses are still way more affordable than they are in Boise. In March 2020, according to realtor.com, the median listing price per square foot in Hudson was $148 compared to $209 in Boise. Fast forward one year to March 2021, and Hudson actually dropped to $143 per square foot, while Boise shot up to $269.
Like other remote workers contributing to the trend, we wanted more space. It topped our wishlist long before the pandemic, but once all of us were forced to be home all the time, it became apparent, more than ever, that our want for space was more of a need. There’s a lot of love among our family three, and we often end up in the same room together, but when it comes to work and school, we all needed some distance from one another – and from the dirty dishes in the sink that needed washed and the clean laundry on the couch that needed folded. This move was about creating physical and emotional space for ourselves, and after living in a shrinking house for 14 years, especially those first few months of the pandemic, we knew exactly what we wanted with our new home: more room to spread out, more room for storage, more room between our neighbors; a basement, a two-car garage, a kitchen that comfortably fit more than one person at a time. We didn’t think those were unreasonable requests. We worked hard, gave back to our community and lived with gratitude for our level of abundance. But it became clear to us that living in Boise wasn’t going to get better for us, and the better life we sought for ourselves was waiting in a more reasonable zip code. In Hudson, we could get twice as much house for roughly half of what it cost in Boise, which is to say, we couldn’t afford that much house in Boise. Which was half the point of moving.
Thanks to Erica’s thorough research, we were finding houses in Hudson that, at least on paper, met our parameters. We both wanted a big lot in a low-noise neighborhood with easy access to trails and water. Erica wanted a house on a road that didn’t have a double yellow line. Not yet knowing my employment situation, I wanted a house on the lower end of our budget, and no matter the price, I wanted basement life again. Quirky features or locations got bonus points, so of course the secluded house on four acres with a small lake was intriguing. Until my parents got up close and saw all the scum. Then there was the small issue of the full foundation repair needed to keep the house from collapsing into the basement.
My mother and father drove by countless houses and walked us through a half-dozen or so FaceTime showings. Brafferton Avenue, Barlow Road, Blue Heron Drive… we got to know the streets of Hudson first by the houses we toured, and those houses, we were finding, fell into two categories: the ones we liked that were already under contract before we got inside, and the ones we liked that were still available because of pond scum, bad basements and the like. It amounted to a big bummer that started to feel like a brick wall, especially after touring one promising house that we were ready to pounce on, only to find that the listing agent had let my mother show it even after it had sold. Adding insult to injury, the main feature of this house was a swank softcore living room with cherry-red carpet, and I had already spent too much time imagining myself holding court in this room with the candlelight just right and the hi-fi in the background.
Like a bad basement, our spirits were starting to collapse underneath us when I got the welcome news that I got to keep my job as marketing director for The Record Exchange. I had pitched the idea and explained how it could work when I told my bosses about our move, and I was elated to hear that they were willing to give it a shot. At the time, I remember saying that if I could pick up The Record Exchange and bring it with us I would, and in a way, I did. Running a marketing department for an independent record store from 2,000 miles away might look odd on paper, but in this brave new world of remote work, just about anything is possible, and everyone agreed it was worth trying, at least until the pandemic tapped out. We were still working on pre-approval for our home loan as we worked out the details of my newly remote position, and adding that guaranteed income to our baseline only helped our cause – and it helped me come to the realization that Erica was right all along about looking for a house a bit north of the butt-end of our budget.
With our excitement somewhat tempered by the realities of Hudson’s torrid housing market, we marched on while keeping our eyes on the clock. Four days after the adult film palace slipped through our fingers, on the morning of July 18, we landed the first showing for a 50-year-old Cape Cod that had just hit the market. It was nearly 3,000 square feet, on close to an acre of land bordered by pines and located in a low-noise area of town. No double yellow line on the road and a big-ass half-finished basement. The back neighbors’ house was half a football field away and mostly hidden by trees.
We were less than five minutes into the video tour when we knew it was the one. It checked off most of the boxes, and it came with an amazing quirk: a set of interior stairs leading from the garage to the basement. As we virtually walked down the stairs via FaceTime, I half-jokingly told my mother to halt the tour and high-tail it to her office to write the offer. In the end, it took us only two hours to get to that point, and when we did, we made an offer slightly above list price in the hopes we could keep this one from sliding away. We also included a testimonial letter complete with family photo, which apparently is a thing now in real estate, one we were unaware of until the family who purchased our home in Boise sent a written plea and a shiny-happy-people portrait along with their offer. This little touch is meant to humanize the transaction and tug at the heartstrings or whatever, but in the case of our home sale, we were just happy to have an offer. They could have sent it on fart-scented paper and it would have smelled like the first rose of spring.
After emailing our signed offer and syrupy letter to my mother, a short but excruciating waiting game ensued. Knowing that multiple showings followed ours that day, my mother strategically set a deadline of 8pm Eastern for the owners to accept or reject our offer. That left us with five hours to kill – a better scenario than the five days it took for our house to sell, but in some ways those five hours felt longer. Initially, we considered leaving the house, but it was 90 degrees on a Saturday during the summer COVID surge, and we couldn’t think straight enough to think of something good to do. Ultimately, we decided to sit tight, stay put and chill. Erica hit the hammock out back. We both cracked open a beer. I might have taken a nap. Honestly, most of it was a blur until my mother called right before the deadline with the news that our offer had been accepted over five others, and that our heartfelt letter had helped seal the deal.
That night we slept better than we had in the past four months, a heavy sigh-of-relief slumber, and we woke up Sunday morning with only one piece of the puzzle left to place: preparing for a 2,000-mile trek across COVID country.
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