Learning one’s way around a new place isn’t easy and I do what I can to simplify. Johnson City isn’t a big town (about 60,000), but it’s not laid out tidily, and in every price range, the possibilities may be pretty well scattered all over town and maybe in nearby towns.
One way to help with the orientation of newcomers is to give them a good map, with what I see as the best possibilities for them marked on the map with Avery removable stickers, sometimes with likely neighborhoods circled, whether or not there are available properties in those areas at the moment. If we have time before they arrive, they get the map in their relocation packet. If not, we at least do a quick “tour” of the map in our first visit.
When we weed out a property, we mark through the little sticker, so they pretty quickly get a feeling for the neighborhoods they liked or didn’t like, as well as the specific properties. This is in addition to a lot of brochures about things to do, schools, library, rivers and lakes, all the things that make this a desirable place to move to.
Our first day for newcomers is typical a brief tour past the landmarks, as I point out the main routes, the library, the shopping areas, etc. The problem is that when we’re looking at properties, we’re not going from one central landmark out to each property, but are taking the best route from “here to there” which doesn’t give them a good feeling for distances and for where the houses are, in spite of the map they have in their laps.
The brainstorm today came about as the local relative was trying to give them times and distances from the various possibilities, scattered all over a fairly wide area. Sometimes I thought his estimates were too high, sometimes too low, but I didn’t want to dispute and I might have been inaccurate also. When I got home, I did a quick spreadsheet listing across the sheet the landmark places they’d likely want to go to most often – the mall, the medical specialty corridor, their son’s house, the craft shop she mentioned, the airport. They can easily add the church where they’ll worship, the golf course, the marina, etc.
Down the chart I put the scattered addresses. With a very few minutes on Mapquest, I filled in with distances and times. It was as I expected, clear as day – as scattered as the possibilities were, there wasn’t more than five minutes difference between any of the properties and the destinations – sometimes as few as two. That eliminated one factor in their decision – all were convenient to where they’d want to go most frequently.
This description won’t make sense this way, but I don’t know how to attach a spreadsheet sample and I’d love to share it or to get suggestions for making it better
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