The Confident House Hunter: A Better, Different Way to Buy

It was a sunny day on beautiful Bainbridge Island two years ago when I met with Dylan Chalk. It was at the New Rose Café, a nearly secret lunch spot hidden among the plants and outdoor sculptures at the historically significant Bainbridge Gardens. Dylan had an idea for a new book about home buying and he was seeking my professional counsel, as well as my writing, editing – and eventually – promotional skills.

As a member of the National Association of Real Estate Editors (naree.org) for more than a couple of decades, I have received enough books about buying a home to fill a very large bookcase. There was a time in fact that my mailbox would be jammed with more than one book, and I would immediately wonder how my colleague, the late-great Bob Bruss, who was the definitive real estate book reviewer, managed to plow through all of that content, as surely he could have stuffed many bookcases with what came into his mailbox.

When Dylan first asked for the meeting, I found myself thinking about the often quoted Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, who in 1899 said: "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Didn't we have hundreds of books written about home buying already?

Healthy skepticism

To say I was a bit skeptical going into this meeting would be a significant understatement, but I wasn't going to discourage Dylan – at least not without first hearing him out. After all, I had just hung my shingle officially as Kevin Hawkins Public Relations just a few months before joining Marilyn and Victor to form our WAV Group Communications division, so this was a business meeting with a potential client, or so I kept reminding myself. But what would evolve from this meeting was quite unexpected, in retrospect.