Barbara and I had journeyed to the Ashland, OR  area in Oct. 2016 looking at the possibility of relocating there. We really liked the place and decided to make some general inquiries about prices, what the market was doing, and the general process of home building in the area.  We quite randomly walked into Gateway Real Estate and talked the first person we met.  That was John Steinbergs, and it was possibly the luckiest thing that happened to us. 

John is a complete professional. He takes his role as an agent and his commitment to helping clients very seriously. It is very clear that he is in this for the long run and that this is a career, not a placeholder until a better job comes along.  At this point, we were just looking and had not yet made the decision to move to the area.  Nevertheless, John spent over an hour printing out listings, telling us about the nuances of local zoning and restrictions (much different than our current state of Texas), and then set us loose with his cell phone number to call if we needed more info.  He set us up with a local builder to talk about costs of building in the area.  We spent the next three days exploring and called John several times.  Each time he patiently answered our questions (why is this lot so much cheaper than the others?  Exactly where is this confused listing??). He was familiar with most of the land listings and had excellent local knowledge (it was cheaper because it would cost a fortune to get power to it). We left, liking the area and wanting to come back.  

I’m sure that John thought this was likely the end of it, but he continued to answer our sporadic questions about the area via text and email. We returned in January 2017, not quite ready to make an offer, but afraid not to since land to build on in the area is disappearing. We showed up without warning (I know, a bit rude of us) and he jumped right into helping us.  We found a great parcel and John was able to guide us through the process of making a seller-finance offer, dealing with a less-than-efficient seller’s agent, and suggesting the best course through the negotiations.  John had a carefully laid out time table of actions for due diligence when we had a contract and brought us to closing with all our questions answered.  He has a great deal of experience in project management that really showed in how he keep things on track.  We were very fortunate to have him since it would have been very difficult to do this remotely from several thousand miles away.  He never pushed an action on us, but his competence and knowledge of the area is very obvious and we would have been fools to ignore what he said.  At no point did we every feel like we made a mistake following his advice.   John simply took care of everything and and we never thought we needed to talk to another agent.

Do we recommend him? You bet.  If we were to buy more property or need to sell what we just bought (NO!), he’d be our first choice and we have absolute confidence that he would do a first rate job.