Anne Secor was in her three-bedroom co-op in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan when the planes hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Ms. Secor, a design consultant, looked out the window at Broadway and saw a stream of people fleeing north. Seeking a respite from the chaos and confusion that followed, she and her then-boyfriend headed north to Canada, settling in a friend’s rented apartment in rural Quebec.
They wound up staying, marrying in 2004 and building a home on a five-acre plot in Morin-Heights, a small town in the Laurentian Mountains. Ms. Secor sold her SoHo co-op in 2005, and the couple welcomed twin girls, Romy and Naia, in 2006.
But Ms. Secor had lived in New York for more than a decade before 9/11, and she missed the city. “New York is the promised land,” she said. “It’s my place.” She visited regularly over the years, and Romy and Naia, now 17, loved it, too.
So when her marriage ended in 2022, Ms. Secor decided that she and her daughters, who were set to begin their junior year of high school, would return to New York.
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She reached out to Simonne Hill, an agent with the New York-based Bizzarro Real Estate Agency, hoping that Ms. Hill could work with her remotely to help find an apartment to rent.
But Ms. Hill had different advice. “I told her it would make a lot more sense for her to actually purchase something,” she said. “Getting a rental was going to be hard for her because she didn’t have an American guarantor.”
Ms. Secor wanted a place with three bedrooms and laundry in the building, and she was hoping to avoid parking her car on the street. Her plan was to sell a handful of investment properties that she had bought in Canada, bringing her budget up to around $625,000. She wanted a lively neighborhood with access to public transit, but at that price most of central Manhattan was out of reach, so she started searching in Harlem and Flatbush, Brooklyn.
“I pretty much knew I would not get into the meat of that sandwich,” she said, referring to all points between.
Most important, she would have to be able to complete the purchase from abroad. “I didn’t want to have to move twice,” she said.
Ms. Hill found some condos that fit the profile, streaming her visits on FaceTime so Ms. Secor could see them from Quebec. Among the properties considered:
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