Featured Listings in Tulsa County and Surrounding Counties in Northeast Oklahoma

If you can think of a dart board and put Tulsa, Oklahoma at the center, then you can visualize “my area.”  Buyers pick the radius from Tulsa and look for property in any one of many concentric circles around Tulsa.  My sellers are happy that I know how to find them.

(Click here to see a larger view of the map of northeast Oklahoma school districts.  From there you can click on the school districts for more information.)

For all intents and purposes, my listing area includes homes and land listings in school districts throughout northeast Oklahoma.  You can click on a school district and go straight to property listings in the MLS for that school district. My personal listings are shown as featured listings among the search results.  You can click on the drop-down menus of this Listings tab to get more information about my personal listings.

I learned where to go by paying attention to the old maps when the tornados come.  The weatherman gets very specific when he is giving the ETA for your neighborhood.  That’s how I had learned that I lived in Sequoyah, not just Claremore.  I had thought it was just a school or a whistlestop.  I pay attention to those old place names.  The post offices are gone, but the place still remembers it’s name.

(Click here to see a map from Geology.com of all the counties in Oklahoma.)

In October 2011 I showed seventy acres of heavily-wooded vacant land in Sand Springs, in Tulsa County to a family who eventually purchased a seventy-acre horse farm in Haskell, in  Muskogee County.  They went from looking northwest of downtown Tulsa and ended up buying property that one of my colleagues in our Coldwell Banker Select Land & Ranch Division suggested was a good deal.  They wanted a country lifestyle within commuting distance of South Tulsa.   Had I solely focused on showing them my listing in Sand Springs I would have missed the opportunity to match them with their dream property.

That same month I worked with an out-of-town cutting horse breeder who had special requirements.  His short list included properties in Adair, Chelsea, Beggs, Haskell, and Morris.  We’d drive an hour in one direction from Tulsa and then drive straight to a property an hour on the other side of Tulsa.

My fondest buyers were snowbirds from Minnesota.  Their short list of properties included residential acreage in Depew, Strang, Chelsea, Adair, and Salina.  They finally settled on purchasing a small farm in Wister, with a view of mountains from every porch.  They showed me backroads I had never been on before; they had spent five summers traveling around looking for a place to retire and knew eastern Oklahoma better than any native I know.

(Click here to see a larger view of the map showing section township and range of northeast Oklahoma Counties.)

In short, Northeast Oklahoma is “my area.”  You see, I moved here from Pittsburgh, PA where I had grown accustomed to feeling my way around the “orange belt” — a color-coded system for identifying little roads that changed names each time another church came into view, connecting towns loosely in a circle around the city.

When I moved to Tulsa we worked with a realtor who knew the city but was challenged in her knowledge of other small cities around Tulsa.  Claremore was like a foreign country.  That was almost thirty years ago.  Since then I have lived in Tulsa, Catoosa, Claremore, Broken Arrow, and once again in Tulsa.   I know Tulsa County and Rogers County best.  However, I have made it my business to learn all the other places around T-town.

I commuted from Tulsa to Dallas for six years.  From Claremore, it’s faster to get to Dallas by heading east to Pryor and heading down Highway 69 across Lake Eufaula.  Likewise from Broken Arrow it’s faster to go to Dallas via Muskogee.  However, if you’re in Tulsa, it’s faster through Haskell and Checotah.  If you’re west of the river, just head on down through Okmulgee.  Every Sunday night I’d head to Dallas a different way and just meander south.  I love going south through Weleetka and down into Hughes County through Wetumka.  It’s such a beautiful drive.

Then there was the year when I taught school in Bartlesville.  I commuted from Claremore.  It didn’t matter what road I took, through Oglesby, Vera, Nowata, Winganon, Foyil, or Oologah, it just didn’t matter.  It was always an hour’s drive.  I loved it.

I grew up wandering around western Connecticut.  My father was a world traveler, a jungle stomper who sold oilfield equipment from Sumatra to Venezuela.  When we’d shop in Danbury, we’d wander home to Brewster via Ridgefield.  First we’d find a doughnut shop where we could obtain emergency rations.  He’d pretend he was lost and ask us for directions.  It was fun.  I learned that the nicest places are tucked away on back roads in hidden areas where nobody would look.

So you’ll notice that my listings are scattered around.  Realtors in my office think I’m crazy.  They ask me why I don’t refer those listings to other people and I wonder who would better be qualified than me.  I have made it a point to learn my way around northeast Oklahoma.  I have made it my mission to learn about land and oilfields as well as architectural styles and horticulture.  I’m a perpetual student and I study the places I go.

So when you visit my listing in Okemah, you can wander around Dripping Springs to get there, or visit the winery in Nuyaka.  You could get there by driving to Henryetta and on to Okemah.  However, from Tulsa the fastest way to get there is through Bristow and on down to Mason where you turn east at the field of Volkswagens.

That’s not to say that I don’t sell houses in Tulsa, too.  They seem easy to me because we don’t have to worry about mineral rights.   Even though most people in Tulsa own their minerals, it’s illegal to drill or produce oil & gas in the city.  It’s the old “not in my back yard attitude” of the oil barons who built this town.  It keeps it beautiful and pristine.  Only ice storms and wind can damage the natural beauty of T-town.

It’s little houses in Broken Arrow and Tulsa that taught me about FHA 203-k rehabilitation loans and short sales.

It doesn’t matter how big the deal is.  It’s the challenge that counts.  When I have represented sellers in financial difficulty and succeeded in selling their home and helping them to avoid foreclosure, I have felt really rewarded even when I didn’t make much money.  I can feel all the angels in heaven rejoicing when a short sale goes through to closing.  Keeping the buyer’s realtor informed and educating the buyers about the procedure so they stay in the deal is the real trick — that and having a good house to sell.

I’m a dreamer who would love to live in the country again, but by choice live in Tulsa.  I can go in any direction to get where I need to be to show property.

Having said all of this, if you list with me, who will end up buying your home?  Statistics show that it may very likely be someone that lives within 16 miles of your property.  It very well may be somebody within 6 degrees of separation of you or someone in your family.  My job is to get help you get your home ready to sell, help you select the right price point, and then market your home so that it will show to it’s best advantage in the local market and in the global market.  Yes, real estate is still hyper-local.  It’s still about location, even if in today’s market it’s more about price.  My job is to bring you local traffic as well as traffic from across the town, the county, the state, or the country.  My job is to drive traffic to your property’s webpage, or website, and eventually to get them to see your home if person, if they are qualified to purchase your property.