Day on a Bald Mountain

Inspirational song: Women Like to Slow Dance (Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers)

My very first clients ever to make it to the closing table and I participated in a year-long courtship dance. I met them two months after I got my license, and I saw them every few weeks after that until we closed thirteen months later. Some weeks I was driving up to Greeley to look at places two or three times a week. I enjoyed the hell out of it, and learned a whole lot about the business, the market, and myself. After they closed, I let them have their own life without me. I didn't creep on them. But I won't lie, I miss them. I really liked the woman who was my contemporary. She was cool.

I've been corresponding with new clients who want to live up in the mountains for a year now. The husband was one of the very last leads to come in from our old web site, and I've been sending him automated updates every time a new property hits the market, plus discussing sites that he sees elsewhere. But they live on the other side of the country, so I had never met them in person until today. They're in Colorado to drive all over the mountains, to make sure their initial target area was really where they wanted to be. They spent days circling around south of I-70, and today made it significantly farther north. We met for the first time face-to-face up at Estes Park, and I rode with them up to several locations. We had to knock it off early when the highway between Drake (tiny mountain town) and Loveland was still closed, and it would have taken an extra hour or more to circle back through Estes, across to Longmont, and then back up to Fort Collins to get to the far northern properties on our list.

It felt a lot like Goldilocks and the three real estate professionals. (The wife is a former agent herself, and the husband is so good at research, he might as well be.) The first site was too steep. The second site was beautiful, but had no real views. The third site took us waaaaaay back in the deep back woods, to the most insane views, all the way to Greeley really, but we never found the actual building site. The road doesn't exist on Google maps. We drove and drove and drove, up a blessedly plowed improved dirt road all the way up to where it looked like there had been a fire on Storm Mountain, but I find no information online about when that fire might have been. The road to the actual property for sale remains a mystery. We never found it, after miles of scary switchbacks and washboard roads with steep dropoffs.

I was glad to meet the couple who had just been words on a computer screen for a year so far. I couldn't help thinking how much the woman in this couple reminded me of the first woman who I worked with for all of that time. I'm okay with doing another courtship slow dance, for people I like this much. It doesn't bother me at all.