Musings and Updates on My Move Back to Buffalo

I'm not quite sure how to start this...and I'm not sure if anyone is even interested in reading. So much has happened that I need to share, or at least write it down somewhere. The best place to start is probably this picture of multiple iconic elements of Buffalo captured into a single shot - Canalside, the Buffalo River, Lake Erie, the dome that's the home of the Buffalo Sabres, the naval park, the break-wall, grain silos, and of course, the Buffalo Skyway. It's an amazing view from the Seneca One Tower where I recently started working after joining M&T Bank. The view has me wondering...why isn't everyone moving to Buffalo?

This newsletter is meant to capture my musings and journey while "moving back home" to Buffalo after 28 years away.

Everything has a genesis point. For our move back to Buffalo, it all started over a year ago in Old Forge, NY, sitting on a dock after a long day of hiking and kayaking with the family on a hot July day. Sitting om that dock for many hours, my wife & I talked about the future. Where do we want to be? How do we set ourselves up? What can we do right now? I won't bore you with the details, but by the time we left that dock in the middle of the night, we made up our minds. "We're moving back to Buffalo!"

This objective was somewhat problematic. We were both working in Rochester, and we had a wonderful home in the Rochester suburbs that we built 20 years ago. Our house was in no condition to sell. We had minimal professional contacts in Buffalo. We have family and friends in Buffalo, but we have nearly three decades of friendships centered around our life and work in Rochester. Who would I go bicycling with?

Here's my "top-10 list" of things that helped us.

(1) Just jump in and start looking for a house right away! We had no idea what we were doing, but we jumped in to see what was available and learn about the market and how the selling process works. We visited dozens of houses in July, August, and September, resulting in our first offer for a house in mid-September. We did not get the house. We put in an offer that was contingent on the sale of our house, and even though we had the best offer, we lost because of that contingency. Which brings me to...

(2) Learn from your mistakes! Losing that house hurt. It was a great A-frame chalet-style home on 4 acres near ski and mountain bike country. We couldn't help but to fall in love with it. But once we studied our loss, we learned we didn't have a prayer of winning that bid. Furthermore, we weren't ready to sell even if we did win. In the current seller's market, you can't win an offer if your offer is contingent on the sale of your home. Also, our home wasn't ready to list. We had no idea of what we needed to do to get ready, and here we were putting in an offer. We learned a great deal from that lost offer, but the biggest thing we learned was...

(3) Find the BEST people to help you, and TRUST them! We hired a new agent with 30 years of experience, and worked with that agent to get our house ready. We learned that our house was a nice house, but it "needed work" to get the value we wanted from it. Our new agent helped us identify and prioritize the right projects. We also teamed up with a new buying agent in the Buffalo area, also with 30 years of experience, who went with us on countless viewings, and helped us navigate the contingencies with a new financing partner. We put in a very competitive offer on a house in the Village of Hamburg - $130K over the listing price - and we still lost! We lost, but we were on the right track. When we put in an offer on our next house, we were ready, and we won it! We found our success by trusting experts who know their business and following their advice. We had all kinds of advice from everywhere. Any time we received advice we thought passed muster, we circled back to our experts. We challenged them constantly, but we listened.

(4) Get your house ready! This probably goes without saying. But even in a strong seller's market, our house needed to be in good enough shape to compete with others. The market is crazy, but the people buying houses aren't. With our agent, we established ground rules to prevent us from spending money on non-essentials...but there was a LOT of painting, cleaning, fixing minor things that were broken a long time, and replacing 20-year old rugs. It took us months, but since the real estate market in WNY is as cold as the weather during the winter months, we felt we had time. Our efforts culminated with a moving out to storage of everything we could remove from the house in April. Our house was FINALLY READY to sell on a moment's notice and at the top of the price range. We took our time getting it ready, and didn't spend a lot of money on things like new kitchens and floors.

(5) Watch the market every week. It's amazing how much you can learn about a house in just a few minutes. We searched Zillow and Realtor.com to find houses. We also had everyone in our family shopping for us - sooooo many emails and posts with links. For every house we visited, we probably saw and researched five or ten. We knew everything about the house by the time we walked through it...even tax records! But even with all that preparation...

(6) Visit the homes you are interested in! I can't stress this enough. We learned just how valuable a good photographer is by visiting homes than looked amazing on line, but were...um...significantly less in person. Also, by visiting a lot of homes, we learned a lot more about what we liked and didn't like.

(7) Look for ways to beat the market! Well...you can't really beat the market, but you can study it and look for opportunities. We learned the housing market is stratified...think of it as layers of cake. The whole cake is the housing market in an area, but each layer of the cake is a subsegment of that market, and each layer has its own flavor, consistency, and cost. What we found is that the "hot real estate market" was actually in specific bands, and the competition in those bands was intense. We noticed that higher-priced homes were sitting on the market for long periods, even after price drops. We started looking at these and found we can get a really nice house if we were patient and found the right one. We found one on Lake Erie that was simply too high for us to go for (especially after lakefront taxes). But we found another that was listed high, had been sitting on the market, and had dropped its price by over $100k...and we got it after floating a lower offer. We don't necessarily want a bigger and more expensive house, but we feel like we got a good deal.

(8) Find the right job and employer. There's a whole other article I can write here. And maybe I will. Andrew Foster (who recently hired me) posted four consideration pillars on finding the right next role. I think I'm solidly aligned with these pillars. The only thing I'll add is to be patient, talk with a million people, expand your network, and wait for the right role. Not everyone can exercise patience, but if you can, I believe patience pays. Which leads me to...

(9) Be patient - it will be hard. ...And it will take longer than you want! My wife and I questioned our sanity many many many times. We always grounded ourselves with the conversation we had in Old Forge...our guiding light! People in our family would say "you're trying to do too much" or "you don't have to move" or my personal favorite "well, that was idiotic!" ?? We wanted to move, and dang it, we were moving! Just had to see how the story would unfold.

(10) Have FUN! We really had no idea how the story would unfold. We could live the past year again a thousand times and have a thousand different endings. So we focused on getting things done and trying to have fun while doing it. I got back into bicycling two years ago after a 20-year absence. Throughout our entire journey, I kept up on the bicycle riding. Just this week, I joined a Buffalo cycling group, Campus Cycling Collective, and rode out of Campus WheelWorks with them for a group ride for the first time. I'm smiling!

Finally, I started this article asking why isn't everyone moving to Buffalo? The people are friendly, the food is amazing, and the architecture is even better. Maybe it's the snow? I leave you with these pictures I took recently at sunset between thunderstorms. Buffalo enjoys sunsets over Lake Erie that rival anything in the Caribbean. Just pull up with your car and your best friend and enjoy it...which is exactly what I did for the last picture.

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