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Speaker 1: Let's move to Maine. My name is Mark Erickson. Today we're talking about Maineliving.com and we welcome Helen Lecount. Hello, Helen. Hello. We're going to talk about moving and sort of the logistics and mechanics of moving, and, and you've done this sort of the ultimate way. You have moved.
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Speaker 1: Coast to coast to coast, you have moved from Maine to California and back again, so that really qualifies you as an expert, doesn't it?
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Speaker 2: Pretty
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Speaker 2: much, yes, it
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Speaker 2: does.
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Speaker 1: Tell us about that journey and how it all went.
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Speaker 2: I grew up in Maine and at the age of 20 I moved to California.
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Speaker 2: I was a kid, so I flew to LA on a red-eye out of Boston, one way ticket, $400 in my pocket, and had a place to stay, and I knew one person in the entire state. I was fearless. I didn't really plan it. It just sort of fell into place because I had someone to stay with.
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Speaker 2: So that was easy, but 17 years later we moved back to Maine in 1995, and that's where the real learning began. There's a lot of planning, attention to detail, and timing that goes into relocating.
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Speaker 2: We drove a U-Haul. We towed a car. We drove another car. We were lucky to have my parents to stay with in their garage to store everything in, but we wanted to be in Portland, which was a few hours away from where my parents lived. Neither one of us were familiar with the Portland or southern Maine area.
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Speaker 2: We really hadn't done a lot of homework. We had no jobs lined up, no place to stay, no daycare lined up. Basically we did everything totally wrong, but we didn't know better. We just didn't have any resources or know anybody in the Portland area, so that's how that
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Speaker 2: started.
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Speaker 1: But that journey teaches you an awful lot, doesn't it?
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Speaker 2: Yes, it does. Yes, it
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Speaker 1: does. Sometimes the hard way, but
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Speaker 2: right, right.
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Speaker 2: That experience changed everything for me. I developed a passion for helping people in, in the relocating process. I've spent years and years cultivating relationships with all different types of people.
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Speaker 2: And I have a lot of resources available to me, so I consider myself a great resource for anybody that may be considering moving to Maine, and it all starts with just a simple conversation.
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Speaker 1: When you moved back to Maine, that's when your real estate career really started,
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Speaker 2: right? Yeah, so my entire career in California was all in professional outside sales.
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Speaker 2: I was always out and about and meeting people. I loved problem solving, coming up with strategies, contract negotiations, great customer service, and closing deals. When we moved to Maine, we didn't know anybody and we didn't know better. I was able to get an office job and that was OK, but I quickly realized that I craved meeting people and
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Speaker 2: Just having the freedom of being in that capacity. So I got my real estate license and I was so happy being back in Maine, and I love the homes here, the farmhouses, the beautiful antique homes, all the variety that we have here, that I just knew my purpose was to help people by combining all of the talent and experience that came with being a professional real estate agent.
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Speaker 2: I was really good at what I did and my business took off and I've never looked back and I'm still going strong.
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Speaker 1: One
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Speaker 1: of the great things about Maine is it's really a lot of different places. Back in my radio days, I spent time working in Augusta. I spent time working in Lewiston, Auburn, and I spent time working in Portland, and those are three very different places.
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Speaker 2: Very different, yes, yeah, we have 16 counties in the state of Maine and um we we cover a lot of territory in the state and, and the counties are very, very unique, so it's important for people to, to look, look at everything in in making their decisions about where, where do they want to be.
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Speaker 1: And of course, the unique thing about Portland is the is the fact that there's a coastline there, and while that's a beautiful and wonderful thing, it can also be a very pricey thing, can't it?
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Speaker 2: Very, yes, yeah, COVID taught everybody that they could work from home and, and so in July of 2020, it was like the floodgates opened up and we just saw this explosion of people coming in from all over to Maine and that attributed to the appreciation that we've experienced here in
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Speaker 2: The greater Portland and southern Maine, other parts of the state, not as much, but we did see appreciation in all 16 counties during the years of
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Speaker 2: COVID.
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Speaker 1: There's been a need, a want, and a desire for people that work in metropolitan Boston to want to escape from Route 128, and a lot of those people are escaping to other states in New England, aren't they?
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Speaker 2: Yes, yes, they are. It's a beautiful state. There's no, no denying it, and I think people that that grew up here or visited or came to a wedding or a camp or anything have, have always kind of fantasized about moving to Maine, and that's what we saw in 2020, so, and we still see it.
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Speaker 1: So, I'm, I'm Joe Businessman. I'm an executive, and I'm on the 22nd floor of a big high rise in metropolitan Boston, and I wanna come to Maine, and you say that the entire experience starts with a conversation. How does that conversation start, Helen?
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Speaker 2: For me, I'm fortunate because I work for an international company where Keller Williams is a very large company and we have, uh, I think we're in 60 countries.
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Speaker 2: So I like to start with having a conversation with somebody that might be in, say,
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Des Moines, Iowa, and they're, they have a house to sell, they don't have an agent there. They're looking to move to Augusta, Maine, for example. I like to refer them to a top agent in the Des Moines, Iowa area. I'll vet them and I'll know that they're going to be the right agent.
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Speaker 2: Be able to get this person's home on the market, give them the the right advice, the right tips to get their home ready, and it gives me a relationship with this agent to keep informed as the home there is on the market.
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Speaker 2: And and is starting to start to get activity and when it goes under contract, so I can start the timeline of that family or person or people coming from that area into Maine and be able to sort of execute the timing in a much more
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Speaker 2: Consistent way than just having somebody show up that just sold their house or their deal fell apart because they didn't have the right agent or
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Speaker 2: something.
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Speaker 1: What do they need to know about moving to Maine? What do they need to prepare for in the state of Maine before they get there?
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Speaker 2: There's a lot. I mean, they need to understand things like what is the job situation look like? Are they relocating with an existing job and they're moving here to be living here remotely, and or are they going to be looking for work? There are a number of things they need to be looking at at the job situation, where they want to live.
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Speaker 2: What are some determining factors of why they're selecting where they're going to be? Do they have medical needs? If they have medical needs, they may want to consider being closer to any of the medical centers. Are they going to be flying for their work? Where are the closest airports? And if they have kids, they're going to want to be looking at what's the most important thing.
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Speaker 2: They want to see for the
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Speaker 1: schools. And if they're working remotely, they, they better be checking on the internet connectivity for where they're going to
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Speaker 1: as
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Speaker 2: well. Absolutely, yes, yes, good point.
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Speaker 1: So you've, you've got sort of this checklist of, you know, if, if this is the goal, here are some of the things that you need to start looking at, and it becomes sort of a logistic challenge, doesn't it?
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Speaker 2: It does. It's a lot. I try to encourage people to take a trip to Maine, even I've, I've had people fly in. I've picked them up at the airport. I've given them a tour of the area. I've looked at some properties with them, just to sort of get an idea about what it is that they're looking for, because they may fly back out on Sunday and the perfect property comes back the following week.
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Speaker 2: I need to know what their hot buttons are and what's going to be the best fit for them to have the courage to call them up and say, I just found it. You need to be on the next flight. When can I
pick you up? And sometimes that that's how it happens.
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Speaker 1: And you mentioned in your example of someone in Des Moines, Iowa that you would use an agent in Des Moines, Iowa. The fact that that agent is local to that particular area.
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Speaker 1: It is key, and I would imagine the reverse is true. When someone is coming to Maine, they want to talk to somebody like you about the real estate. They want to find a lender in Maine to talk about the money and some other local folks,
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Speaker 2: right? Yes, definitely, and that's a, that's a big thing. Let me just kind of break it down. So there are 4 regions in the United States. 3 of the regions right now are in buyers.
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Speaker 2: markets that means that there are more homes on the market than there are buyers for those homes. The 4th region is the Northeast, which we are part of. That region is still in a seller's market, which means there are more buyers than there is existing inventory. We are still seeing multiple offers.
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Speaker 2: If properties are priced and marketed correctly, the first thing as an agent that I look at if I'm looking at multiple offers for a seller client is who is the lender, who has attached the pre-approval with a local lender with their offer, if they're an out of state lender, an internet lender, or something that we don't know or we're not.
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Speaker 2: Familiar with, we don't know what kind of performance we can expect from that lender. When we know it's a local lender, we have a proven track record of doing real estate transactions and having them finance the transactions, and we can bank on that lender getting the transaction to the finish line, and that's what it's all about.
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Speaker 1: So where is the market at as far as types of sales that you're seeing or those trends? Are we talking about single-family homes, multi-family homes, condos? Are we talking about land for new builds? What's going on out there right now?
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Speaker 2: Well, single.
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Speaker 2: Families are always always going to be in demand. Condo markets, there is some discussion where the financing for condos is going to be a little bit more strict, I believe, starting in August. That's fairly recent.
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Speaker 2: But the luxury end of the market has not really taken a backseat at all. We still have people coming in and a lot of them paying cash for, you know, multi-million dollar homes on the ocean or on the lakes and whatnot. Multis have, they're coming down price-wise a little bit. Um, it used to be that you, you, you, the general rule of thumb was like $100,000 per unit.
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Speaker 2: And and it made sense for somebody to live in one unit and rent out the other two or three units where the rents would pay the mortgage, and that's gotten really skewed. We just don't have the kind of inventory in Maine that a lot of other states does have. We've had some pauses with 9/11, then with 2008.
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Speaker 2: And then COVID, and then with tariffs and delays and so forth. It used to be a builder would build a spec home and people would just come and see the spec home and buy it and off they go.
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Speaker 2: But now most builders are not building spec homes. They're building only custom homes. There aren't a lot of good deals for the people that want to flip. There's not enough margin for most of the flippers that are out
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Speaker 2: there.
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Speaker 1: So if the folks that are buying homes these days are people that are going to live in these homes, they're not buying them as investments or quick turnarounds.
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Speaker 2: I'm not seeing as much as many investors lately as I have, and we saw quite a few again during COVID. We saw a lot of people coming and buying their own homes in the area to live in because they wanted to get out of the big cities and
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Speaker 2: They wanted to be, you know, have their whole family all living together under one roof, but then you did have investors that were coming and buying up Maine property, and that was all part of the craziness of the COVID years.
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Speaker 1: You'd mentioned that.
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Speaker 1: You've seen people coming in and paying cash for some high-end properties. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say probably those folks were older demographics, people that had a lot of cash lying around and, and were able to do that. Would that be a fair assumption?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd say older, meaning 50s, 60s, in that range. I'm seeing families collectively buy properties so that they that that they're sharing an investment where they're all going to be taking turns at different times living in this luxury property and or when they're not here.
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Speaker 2: They, they may be interested in doing Airbnb or doing some short term rentals.
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Speaker 1: So we'll call those seasoned buyers. What about the other end of the spectrum? How do you deal with, with young buyers because buying a house is a big, gangly, complicated process. What's the treatment and your recommendations for maybe a first-time home buyer and how do you handle those folks?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good question. What I see with a lot of the first-time homebuyers is that they're, that they need to get educated. They need to understand what the process looks like, and most importantly, they need to know what are the expenses that are going to occur while buying a home. Some first-time homebuyers are not prepared to actually buy. They might have a small down payment or maybe no down payment, which might
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Speaker 2: Get them into a home, but they're kind of scrambling a little bit if they don't have money for an appraisal, an inspection, their closing costs if the seller's not going to be paying closing costs. They need to understand that it's going to cost them money to get into a home, but it's going to cost money once they own the home. They need to be prepared for
any unforeseen.
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Speaker 2: Situations that might come up 1 year, 2 years down the line, their heating system might fail or something happens to their appliances and they need to scurry and buy appliances. So a lot of times I see family kind of kicking in to help out, but not everybody has that luxury, that ability, but
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Speaker 2: The average home market, I mean, in the greater Portland in the southern Maine area, it, it is pricey and a lot of the uh first time home buyers are migrating into a more rural areas where they might have a longer commute, but they're able to afford their first home.
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Speaker 1: I think first-time homeowners have that, that one very strange moment because if you've spent the better part of your life when the washing machine breaks and you just call the landlord and the landlord sends somebody to fix it, and the first time you're the homeowner and the washing machine breaks, and there's nobody to call, it's all up to you.
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Speaker 2: Yes, and,
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Speaker 1: and I, I, I think the best advice is, is to, you know, maintain a house account and, and put some money into that and, and try to keep that built up and don't touch that for anything other than the house because sooner or later you will need it, right?
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Speaker 2: Exactly. I try to coax the first-time homebuyers to try to squirrel whatever they can away and whether it's a $3000 5000 dollars fund.
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Speaker 2: So that every year if if the property does need some work, uh, every year they they're they're putting that money into new windows or painting or or whatever whatever it is that they need because they're just investing in their home. That's a big obstacle like you've mentioned earlier, people that are renting.
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Speaker 2: might be paying $2000 a month and their mortgage payment is $22,200 and they need to understand that they might be spending more in the short term per per month by owning a home, but there are so many more advantages by owning a home versus paying a landlord's mortgage for them.
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Speaker 1: If somebody is thinking right now about moving to the state of Maine, other than, of course, calling you, what should they be thinking about doing? What should they be ready to do right away?
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Speaker 2: I would say do your homework, start researching the state of Maine. We have a lot to offer, but we have some areas that are very, very rural, and you kind of need to figure out what are home prices in the different counties looking like.
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Speaker 2: And what type of needs do you have that would put you into an area that you need to be closer to a commuting distance to your new job or to the airport or to the medical center. I can educate people on Maine, but it's really going to be up to the listener or the person who's thinking about moving to Maine and do more homework, which we didn't do when we made our move in 1995.
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Speaker 1: If there's no geographic specific
reason for someone, if, if they're moving and they're gonna work remotely and they don't have to be in a particular town, city, or county for any reason, what would be your favorite part of the state to move somebody to?
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Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good one. There's so many. We have beautiful coastal communities. We have beautiful lake communities. We've got beautiful farms. I think it all depends on the lifestyle that the person wanting to move to Maine is looking to achieve. And as you mentioned earlier, the internet accessibility is critical for anybody working remotely.
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Speaker 1: All the moving.
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Speaker 1: Parts that go into relocating, no matter where you're coming from, it can become a stressful situation. What are some tips and tricks that you can offer to make it sort of as smooth as it possibly can be?
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Speaker 2: I think it will come down to planning, proper planning. Figure out the timing for when you want to make your move. April, May, June are our busiest months. It's the spring market.
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Speaker 2: Everybody that is looking to buy, wants to buy. They want to buy now, they want to close in July, they want to take their vacation, and then in August, they want to get their kids, if they've got kids into the schools and they're all set.
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Speaker 2: Then you have September, October, where you have the people coming in that are are looking to buy the lake properties, the um commun coastal community properties where it's it's a property that's been in the family for years and years and years.
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Speaker 2: It's finally time to to to sell. They want to sell before winter comes. So there's, there's that window. So you kind of have to have a sense of what's going on in your real estate market, whether you're in another spot in Maine or you're in Massachusetts, for example. What's going on in that market.
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Speaker 2: That's where I want to have a conversation with whatever agent you might be using to list your property, because I want to really understand is this person experienced? Are they pricing the property correctly? Have they properly marketed the property to be able to get this under contract and closed so that we can fulfill that timeline of getting these.
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Speaker 2: People from point A to point B. The more prepared you are, the less stressful the whole process is going to be, and that may include if you're not that familiar with the area and you need more time, you may want to consider renting a property for a 6 month lease to at least have a place to land here and then acclimate.
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Speaker 2: Yourself to the different areas to figure out where do you want to end up buying a home and that's where you want to use, you know, a great realtor who is a wealth of information and resources available to you to help you with all of that.
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Speaker 1: For many buyers, it really is a cause and effect kind of thing because a lot of people, the purchase of the new place depends on the sale of the old place,
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Speaker 2: doesn't it? Yes, it does. It goes hand in hand. That's why I really feel passionate about being involved in that part, not on a day to day talking to their agent in Des Moines, Iowa, for example, but no, making sure that I put a top agent.
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Speaker 2: To lead the charge of doing all the right things and providing that person with the right advice to get that home on the market and then closed so that now we're we're working the timeline and now we're not coming into unexpected fiascos that didn't need to
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Speaker 2: happen.
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Speaker 1: If you'd like more information about Helen Lecount and her son because your real estate is a sort of a family affair, isn't it, Helen?
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Speaker 2: Yes, it is. Yes. Uh, so my son Spencer was 5 years old when I got into real estate, and he is now my real estate partner at the age of 33. So we're a mother-son team.
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Speaker 2: And he's been licensed for the last 10 years and 27 for me, and the good thing is we purposely have not grown a huge team because we want hands on. We want to know that we'll take that call from any buyer client or any seller client that calls that they're not talking to.
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Speaker 2: You know, 1 or 2 or 10 different team members and never hear from us again after the first conversation. That's not who we
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Speaker 2: are.
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Speaker 1: Find out more about Helen and her boy Spencer online at Maineliving.com, Maineliving.com. And if you do move to Maine and the weather
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Speaker 1: Turns nice at some point. For my money, Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park are a must visit location. I'm, I'm just saying.
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Speaker 2: Absolutely.
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Speaker 1: Ellen Lecount, thank you for spending time with us.
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Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me. You have a great day. For Let's
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Speaker 1: Move to Maine, I'm Mark Erickson.