Nathan Smith and Megan Jones-Smith enjoyed living in Austin, Texas, for 13 years, but it never really felt like a forever home.<\/p>\n
\u201cEspecially with the last election, it can be very hard to live in Texas sometimes if you\u2019re a progressive person,\u201d said Mrs. Jones-Smith, 53, who works in the arts in client services.<\/p>\n
Last year, they considered moving up to British Columbia \u2014 Mrs. Jones-Smith is from Canada \u2014 but \u201cit would have been a whole lifestyle change,\u201d said Mr. Smith, 50. They now had two school-age sons (Noah, 15, and Liam, 12) to think about, not to mention Mr. Smith\u2019s job as an executive at an American agricultural company. The immigration process seemed daunting.<\/p>\n
[Did you recently buy a home? We want to hear from you. Email: thehunt@nytimes.com<\/a>. Sign up here<\/a> to have The Hunt delivered to your inbox every week.]<\/p>\n So they turned instead to Chicago, where the couple first met two decades ago and still had a warm familiarity. It was also home to a branch of their sons\u2019 school in Austin, which would allow them to continue the curriculum. The initial goal was a single-family home that could fit a family of four (plus a dog), and was within walking distance of the school.<\/p>\n The Smiths also wanted to plant firm roots for when the boys left the nest. \u201cI had friends whose kids were older, and when they moved right after their kids graduated, the kids didn\u2019t have a home to go home to,\u201d said Mrs. Jones-Smith.<\/p>\n They reached out to Joe Zimmerman, operating principal at Keller Williams One Chicago, who had helped them buy their first condo in Chicago\u2019s West Loop neighborhood years ago.<\/p>\n Hunting online from Austin with a budget of around $900,000, the Smiths homed in on North Side neighborhoods including Bowmanville, Ravenswood and Lincoln Square. Mr. Zimmerman warned that in those areas, \u201csingle-family homes are limited and highly sought after,\u201d often sparking bidding wars.<\/p>\n Indeed, the Smiths found that available single-family homes listed at around $800,000 or $900,000 would move fast and sell for well over $1 million.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can get a nice condo in Chicago that\u2019s three or four bedrooms that has the same square footage as our house did in Austin,\u201d said Mrs. Jones-Smith.<\/p>\n Time was of the essence: They had to wrap up a deal before the new school year started. Their only requisite, besides location, was a top-floor unit, so there\u2019d be no risk of hearing neighbors above.<\/p>\n Find out what happened next by answering these two questions:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nathan Smith and Megan Jones-Smith enjoyed living in Austin, Texas, for 13 years, but it never really felt…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,78787,134,133,3268,43497],"class_list":["post-201151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-tex","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-chicago-ill","tag-real-estate-and-housing-residential"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}