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 here in Raleigh, and I have maintained my license 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.

You will not believe what your money buys here

The first open house I sat 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.

That house in San Diego County starts at three million, and where you put it swings things a lot. Drop it in Rancho Santa Fe and you are at four to five million or more. Out in East County, same two and a half acres, it comes down from there.

But three million is the floor. For a house I can show you here at seven hundred eighty.

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.

The part nobody prepares you for

How green it is.

I do not mean that as a throwaway line. California is beautiful, but a good part of the year it is brown and you stop noticing. Here the tree canopy closes over the road in summer. There are lakes. Water actually runs in the creeks.

I traded the ocean for that, and I did not expect to be as happy about it as I am.

The process here is genuinely different

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 a North Carolina seller can legally decline to disclose almost anything about the house.

If you are used to the California system, several of those can cost you real money if nobody warns you.

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.