Licensed in California and North Carolina

Moving from California to North Carolina

After 25 years in California, I made the decision to move back to North Carolina to be close to my aging parents and my sister and her family. I was blessed to be invited to join The Coley Group at Compass, which means I am now licensed in both North Carolina and California.

So when a California family calls me about moving to the Triangle, I am not guessing at what is ahead of them.

What does my money buy in North Carolina compared to California?

The first open house I sat here in North Carolina was a custom-built two-story. Four bedrooms, three and a half baths, hardwood floors throughout, an office, an upstairs bonus room, a screened-in porch, a real backyard, and two and a half acres.

$780,000.

In my experience a comparable house on comparable acreage in San Diego County would run well north of $3 million, and the location swings that number hard. Drop it in Rancho Santa Fe and you are at $4 to $5 million or more. Out in East County, same two and a half acres, it comes down from there.

But $3 million is roughly where that conversation starts. For a house I can show you here at $780,000.

This is the part that lands hardest for Californians, and it changes the entire conversation. Buyers who had resigned themselves to a condo start looking at land. People who assumed they would never have a yard are asking about acreage. The budget you arrived with usually buys a different life than the one you were planning.

My advice: do not anchor on the house you were going to buy in California. Anchor on what you actually want, then find out what it costs here. Those are usually two different conversations.

What surprised me most about moving from California to North Carolina?

How green it is, and how much of it there is.

California has scenery most states cannot touch, and I never got tired of looking at it. What North Carolina gives you is variety, and most of it sits within a few hours of the Triangle.

The tree canopy closes over the road here in summer. Water actually runs in the creeks. Falls Lake, Jordan Lake and Harris Lake are all close enough for an afternoon. The Blue Ridge Mountains are roughly four hours west. The Atlantic is about two hours east, with the Outer Banks a little past that. You are not choosing between mountains and coast. You can do both in the same weekend if you want to.

Then October arrives and the whole state turns over. I graduated high school in North Carolina, so none of that was new to me. What surprised me was how much I had missed it without ever quite realizing.

I traded one kind of beautiful for another, and I did not expect to be as happy about it as I am.

How is the North Carolina home buying process different from California's?

This is what trips up California buyers most, and it has nothing to do with price.

North Carolina has a due diligence fee, and California has no equivalent. You pay it directly to the seller, up front, and it is generally non-refundable. What you are buying with it is the seller taking the house off the market and giving you time to examine it. Your due diligence period then expires on a date rather than when somebody signs a contingency removal. An attorney closes your deal instead of an escrow company. And on North Carolina's residential property disclosure form, a seller may check No Representation on nearly every question rather than answer it. That is legal and common. It is not a license to hide things, since a seller still cannot lie or conceal and the mineral and oil and gas disclosure is narrower. But it does mean the form itself may tell you very little. Federal rules you already know, like lead based paint disclosure on pre 1978 homes, apply here the same as they do in California.

If you are used to the California system, several of those can cost you real money. I make sure my clients know about them up front.

I wrote a full walkthrough of all of it here: Moving to the Triangle from out of state.

Read that before you write an offer.