Relocating to Long Island without guessing at the towns

Mark Vogler and Gina DeMaio are Relocation Certified and part of the North-East Global Relocation Ambassadors with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Laffey International Realty. We work relocations through corporate programs and with families moving on their own, coming from the city, from upstate, or from across the country.

We start with geography before houses. In your first call we ask where you will be working, how often you will commute, and what you want close by: water, a downtown, a train station, open space. Then we narrow Long Island down to a short list of towns and explain each one, including the trade-offs. We grew up in Deer Park and live in Huntington Village now, so we can describe these places from the inside.

When you cannot be here, we tour for you. We do live video walk-throughs and tell you what the camera misses: the traffic on the road out front, the smell of a damp basement, the slope of the backyard. Mark has 30 years in construction, so he looks at houses for you the way you would if you knew what to look for.

And we keep the clock in view. If you have a start date, we plan the search, the offer and the closing backward from it.

If you can visit before you buy, one well-planned trip beats three rushed ones. We build the day around the towns on your short list, not around open houses. You drive the commute you would actually make, at the hour you would make it. You walk a downtown on a weekday, not just a Saturday. You see two or three homes in each town that show what your budget buys there, so the trade-offs become real.

We also tell you what not to do. Do not pick a town from a single drive-through on a sunny afternoon. Do not assume a house is in the school district its mailing address suggests. Do not sign a long lease across the county from where you will end up buying. Many relocating buyers rent briefly first, and when that makes sense we say so.

By the end of a trip like that, most people have narrowed Long Island down to one or two towns. From there the search moves quickly, in person or by video.

The hardest part of a relocation is often the distance. You may be choosing a town you have only visited once, on a schedule set by a new job, while still living somewhere else. We work around that. Before you fly in, we sit down by phone or video for a real consultation so we understand what your days will look like here: where you will work, how you will get there, and what matters most at home. Then we narrow the towns before you arrive instead of spending your trip driving in circles.

Between visits, we can walk a house for you. Mark has 30 years in construction and homebuilding, so when we preview a home on your behalf we are looking at the roof, the mechanicals, the basement and the additions, not just the staging. You get our notes and video, and you decide which homes are worth seeing in person. As Relocation Certified agents and North-East Global Relocation Ambassadors with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, we have done this many times, and we answer the phone well into the evening, which helps when you are working from a different time zone.