Wishing everyone Feliz Navidad — and also patience (required for most endeavors here and abroad)!
Jill’s back in town, having finally secured an appointment with the Spanish Consulate in San Francisco. (This literally took MONTHS.) But as she needed to establish residency there before she could qualify for an indefinite stay in Spain, she’s spent the last month in Barcelona getting to know the neighborhoods and finding an apartment to legally rent. (It’s fabulous AND big enough for visitors, so guess where I’ll be headed in 2026?)
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The personal stories of one Realtor’s battles and triumphs in the highly-competitive Bay Area Real Estate Market, seeking to illuminate and humanize the very real ups-and-downs of homeownership.
Ironically, she couldn’t complete the paperwork in Spain, but had to fly BACK to San Francisco, where she had initially begun the application process; a process that can take weeks – not days – to complete. In the meantime, Jill is comfortably ensconced in our guest room while they run her fingerprints, check her criminal record (she’s clean), and sign off on her physical. In short, emigrating to a foreign country isn’t as easy as Instagram or Tik Tok might have you believe. In other words: it’s a bureaucratic slog! (How do you say “nightmare” in Spanish?) Unfortunately, it’s been a series of miscalculations, a fair amount of backtracking, unnecessary duplication of efforts, and uncertainty and frustration along the way. Such is the nature of the beast; life lessons are almost always learned the hard way.
Yes, there are countries that beckon, and they are certainly more open to foreigners than the United States currently is, but the bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through to establish long-term residency – outside your country of origin – are anything but easy, as Jill has painfully learned. In other words, if you want to retire to another country, leave yourself more time than you might expect, and get ready for a ton of paperwork, much of which will need to be notarized and apostilled.
Luckily, as Jill has left our employment (we miss her), she’s got time on her hands, and now, she’s mastering the art of patience.
“Time” isn’t a commodity that we have a whole lot of when it comes to selling homes (although we DO have a ton of paperwork), which is why we have a well-established team, and a finely-honed checklist we need to accomplish BEFORE the property comes to market. While the public only sees the final version (which typically includes painting, staging, and gardening), behind the scenes, we’re working at breakneck speed to present our properties in their best light.
We begin by putting on a contractor’s lockbox, pulling the permit history, setting up inspections, ordering a sewer lateral test, filling out pages and pages of disclosures, ordering a preliminary title report, gathering bids from vendors, addressing any outstanding “to dos” that have been largely ignored, refinishing hardwood floors, replacing worn carpet, washing windows, deep cleaning the home, replacing light fixtures, updating kitchens and baths, replanting the beds and pots, trimming trees, hiring a photographer, creating digital fliers and print materials, developing a complete disclosure package, entering the property into the MLS (Multiple Listing Service), putting up a “For Sale” sign, and on and on and on . . . It’s a WHOLE lot to do in a short period of time, but miraculously, working in tandem, we typically bring our listings to market in mere weeks.
In between the “tasks,” we’re often calming Sellers’ nerves, while urging them to continue to pack, purge, donate, and have faith that everything will come together. (It almost always does.) Under the heading of “the universe abhors a vacuum,” things do have a way of working out if we set our minds, our hearts, and our intentions into motion, and then follow through as we intended. (Good intentions mean nothing without action.)
Which isn’t to say that our transformations come off seamlessly or without a hitch (invariably, they are hitch-filled.) The reality is, we run into unexpected and unwelcome surprises constantly, but given that our greatest skill set is problem solving, WHATEVER THE ISSUE(!), we’ll work our way through it as we have done hundreds of times before. That’s not just true for real estate, but for life in general.
What’s the moral of the story?
As Jill’s journey powerfully demonstrates, success comes from the ability to overcome life’s hurdles and challenges. In the end, I do not doubt that Jill will weather the storm, tie up any loose ends, and ultimately achieve her long-term goal of retiring in Northern Spain, because selfishly, I’d like to celebrate next Christmas at her new casa in Barcelona.
Feliz Navidad.
How can we help you?
Julie Gardner & Sarah Abel | Compass Realty
Not just Realtors, but consultants in all things house and home, we’re here to educate, explore, examine and refer . . . In short, you may count on us to take care of your home as if it were our own and anyone who knows us, knows we take pretty darn good care of our homes.
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