CP
Cydney Priest
Sep 10, 2025
Working with Jewel was an absolutely outstanding experience. Relocating from out of state was a stressful process, but her exceptional communication and professionalism quickly put us at ease. She consistently went above and beyond. Personally touring homes on our behalf and navigating the many unexpected challenges that came about during the sale of our previous home.Throughout the process, Jewel handled everything with patience, grace, and confidence. We also had the pleasure of working with Randi, who was equally as amazing. Her organization and attention to detail helped keep everything on track. Together, Jewel and Randi made an incredible team. Thanks to their dedication and expertise, we found our perfect home, and we couldn't be more grateful. We feel incredibly fortunate to have found them and will absolutely turn to them for any future real estate needs in the Fairbanks area!
Jewel and Randi have been wonderful and highly effective partners in our effort to downsize from our house in the hills to a condo in town.
In October 2024 we made the decision that the upcoming winter would be our last up in our maintenance-demanding house in the hills, and that we would try, before the onset of the following winter, to be fully settled in a simpler living environment and have our house out of our lives. It seemed like a formidable task at the time, and one that might not even be successful. We had worked with Jewel and Randi to purchase the house in 2009 and had a lot of good memories and respect for them, so we contacted Jewel to see about helping us purchase a simpler place and sell our old place.
We met with Jewel in early November, and she was supportive of our strategy to buy the new place first, move into it, and then prepare the house for sale, suggesting that it would be best to have the house on the market by early summer. With a 30-minute look at our place, she assessed the sale value and expressed confidence in her assessment.
The buyers market for condos was very slim in November, but we came across one that was in an area we really liked. It didn't "show" very well, needing a lot of work, but Jewel emphasized that the kind of condo we were looking for just didn't come on the market very often in Fairbanks, and if it did, we'd probably be in a bidding war. Jewel encouraged us to make a low offer on the condo and then invest in our own improvements, and that turned out to be an excellent course of action. As it turns out, we love the area more than anything, and that's something we wouldn't have gotten in most other places. So, the buying and renovation process was tiresome, but we found ourselves settled in the condo at beginning of April, which was much earlier than we might have hoped for way back in October. If we hadn't heeded Jewel's initial gentle warnings, we would not have even realized the first phase of our dream in a timely manner, and may not have had a chance to prepare and sell our house before the next winter.
With the early April move to the condo, we were fortunate to be able to prepare the house for sale, and beyond the basic cleaning I think the best moves we made - as advised by Jewel - were to invest in new carpet and interior painting, as well as some basic repair work. Within a month - in early May - the house was on the market and within 36 hours we had seen a burst of showings and had two offers in hand, for a little more than Jewel had assessed back in November.
The contract started smoothly, the buyer was more than cooperative, but a couple of major snags - full septic replacement and heavy deck repair - complicated the process and resulted in a significant cash outlay. As sucky as this was, it was essentially unavoidable and Jewel and Randi helped us through it with pragmatic advice, and a delay of only six days from the original closing date.
So, here we are looking back at the process, no longer needing to worry about the house, able to quickly pay off our condo mortgage, and replenish most of the savings we invested in the buying and selling process, all before the end of June. Through the constant help and good nature of Jewel and Randi, we have reached the end of what started in late October as an impossible dream.
Through this long process, we came to respect the personal, yet business-focused, perspective. In any ambitions venture like this, hard times will happen and they can't be avoided. Jewel and Randi kept up the good cheer while focusing on the non-emotional aspects of what, pragmatically, needed to be done to achieve our goals.