Karin and Jeff Siebold
Caswell Beach, North Carolina
For Jeff and Karin Siebold, the search led to Caswell Beach, North Carolina, a community
of 400 people. It lies 30 miles south of Wilmington on the Intracoastal Waterway, at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. Jeff advises developers, pension-fund managers, and independent investors on real-estate market opportunities throughout the mid-South.
He stays on the road nearly half of each month, while Karin manages the business’ home office.
Says Jeff, “We’ve become geographically independent.” And years of building solid relationships with clients, he adds, “gave us
the credibility and track record that allowed us to move where we wanted.”
When it came to deciding where that might be, Jeff and Karin set up litmus tests that proved helpful: “We needed to
be within 45 minutes of a major airport,” says Jeff. Wilmington, linked to Caswell Beach by good highways, filled the bill. Other must-haves included reliable cell phone service and a high-speed Internet connection—“if you handle the volume of information that we do, you have to have a good cable or DSL provider,” Jeff says. Overnight delivery service “was a surprisingly important component for us,” Karin adds.
“We started looking in southern Maryland, and worked our way down to the Gulf Coast,” Jeff explains. “We’d select promising cities, draw a circle around them with a 30-mile radius, and start researching climate, quality of life, infrastructure. We ruled out places like the middle of the Outer Banks, because we’d have to rely on ferries, and the cell and Internet services are iffy.” Caswell Beach met all of the Siebolds’ requirements. It also measured up, according to Jeff, “because it’s a small town, a nice family community, with a mix
of retirees and people who work nearby in Southport in banking, retail, and tourism.”
The Siebolds’ home is part of a golf course community of nearly 80 lots, developed in the early 1990s. Their 2,700-square-foot Cape Cod–style house has four bedrooms, a wraparound porch, and a magnificent spiral staircase, built by a local craftsman. The couple’s office, in a spacious room over the garage, is scheduled for
a window addition to capture ocean views. But the water isn’t just scenery. Jeff’s three children use the beach for sailing, surfing, and skimboarding.
