WAUKESHA, Wis. House shopping is a deceptively lightweight phrase for the mission confronting Tina Williamson and Kay Ripp.
Williamson is in the throes of husband Ron’s fifth corporate transfer. He has a new, lucrative position as director of manufacturing at a Waukesha company. She has a mid-$400,000 house in St. Louis to unload, a socially shattered 16-year-old to soothe, an exuberant near-11-year-old to quell and a forced marital separation in its third, tension-producing month.
While her husband was courted by his new company, as the “trailing spouse” she’ll have to hustle to keep her teaching career on track.
“I’m the guy in the middle,” Williamson sighed, “trying to pull it all together.”
Realtor Kay Ripp, the Williamsons’ corporate relocation agent, has this challenge:
Find a mid-$400,000s contemporary house, five years or newer, within 20 minutes of Waukesha, with high resale value and top-flight schools, in a metropolitan area replete with traditional, Colonial and Tudor style homes but scant on contemporaries.
On a blustery early spring morning, Ripp, a veteran agent at Coldwell Banker Equitable Stefaniak, pulled her gray Dodge Intrepid aptly named with 71,000 miles in three years into the driveway at Ron Williamson’s company-financed downtown apartment.
Tina Williamson, fresh from a riverside jog, slid into the car, ready for the day’s hunt. It was the fifth day of her second week-long visit.
“I have serious intentions this time,” she declared, crossing her arms and nodding her head in affirmation.
Ripp smiled, wheeling toward the first of eight houses on the day’s agenda.
Similar scenes are played out thousands of times in hundreds of American cities and, increasingly, foreign ones.
Corporate relocations born in the opportunity-knocks 1950s are a mainstay in today’s American workplace.
No government agency tracks relocations, nor does the national trade group Employee Relocation Council. Sales figures are jealously guarded in this fiercely competitive business, which is undergoing the same merger-and-acquisition ferment that has reshaped other segments of American business into lean-and-mean global industries.
Promotional literature from relocation giant Cendant Mobility Services of Danbury, Conn., suggests the scope: its 85,000 U.S. transferees constitute “just over 50 percent” of the market.
“Summer is still the busiest time of year, but these days, people move any and all times of the year. Some want to move when the kids are in school, to help them adapt,” said Pete Meiklejohn, vice president and general manager of Graebel Van Lines in Waukesha. About 90 percent of his Wausau-based company’s business is corporate relocations.
While middle managers once dominated transferee ranks, “middle management’s dead, taken over by computers, and the high numbers we see now are computer engineers, any type of engineers,” said Paul G. Haislmaier, president/owner of The Relocation Center.
Wisconsin gets 150 to 175 transferees per month, estimates Ken Sanders, relocation director for metro Milwaukee’s Coldwell Banker Equitable Stefaniak and Coldwell Banker Lakeshore offices.
His firm handled about 300 relocation-related house purchases, worth some $40 million, last year, he estimated.
Maybe so, but there still is lots of room for local competitors, contended Haislmaier.
“Nobody has a corner on this market. The reality is, this is a niche market,” he said.
Transferees may be certain house buyers, but they’re high-maintenance customers.
“Relocation is right up there with death and divorce on the stress level,” noted Bev Berberich, corporate relocation manager at S.C. Johnson Wax in Racine and past president of the national Employee Relocation Council.
“No matter how good the corporate relocation policy is or how well it’s administered, the stress is still there. A family is getting uprooted,” said Berberich, who estimates her company relocates 130 to 140 workers a year.
“That’s why you need a good relocation real estate professional. Whereas a local person shopping for a house typically knows a lot about the neighborhoods, schools and churches, for someone coming in from another city, it’s like going in a black hole. They need a lot of hand-holding,” Berberich said.
“The agent has to be very knowledgeable, willing to work unbelievable hours and provide all sorts of extras,” she said. “I’ve even heard of an agent taking snowsuits and sleds to the hotel room for the children of people from New Orleans.”
Ripp calls Milwaukee’s charms “our best kept secret,” but worries: “If they don’t like the homes or the area, the transferee might not take the job. Then the employer would come to me and say, `What did you do?”‘
A CRS with 19 years of realty experience, Ripp is a veteran of countless client melodramas, outbursts, squabbles, misadventures, misfortunes and other drains on good will.
“I’m a support group, really. Most transferees have great family units. They stick together. There’s a sense of excitement. But it’s not easy to be uprooted, especially when you have children. Especially when the children are older. Or when the relocation wasn’t really the transferee’s choice.
Like most relocation agents, Ripp interviews clients by telephone in advance. She mails or faxes pertinent newspaper and magazine clippings, and background data on schools and communities.
Her professional tools: “A comfortable car with a large back seat, since we’re sometimes in there seven, eight hours a day; bottled water; a set of fact sheets on homes, in the order we’ll see them, for every person in the car, and a map, with the properties flagged.”
