We recently purchased a home with the help of Jeane and had an exceptional experience. I normally don’t write reviews, but Jeane went way over the top in helping us, I wanted to recognize her efforts and abilities. My wife and I first met Jeane when she was selling a beach house for my brother and sister in-law. We met Jeane at an open house and she seemed very friendly and genuinely interested in our family. My brother in-law is a very large real estate developer (I think thousands of properties) who’s opinion I really respect, so when he told me that Jeane was doing a great job for them, we naturally decided to work with her. I called Jeane several months later to ask for her help in finding an investment property in Santa Cruz. Jeane showed us several properties over the course of a few months and helped us make an offer on a property. Through the next few years, my wife and I continued to think about purchasing a beach house for ourselves and looked at several different options with Jeane. During this period, Jeane was always very helpful and responsive even though we didn’t really know what type of house or location we wanted. Finally, we became far more serious and during a more concentrated period of a few months, we viewed several homes and finally purchased a wonderful vacation rental that will double as our family’s getaway beach house. We decided to remodel the house immediately and Jeane worked with us during escrow to help plan the remodel and ensure that we could maintain the vacation rental permit. She helped us find resources and took many days out of her schedule to provide access to the house while we met with designers and contractors.

Throughout this process we came to appreciate several qualities that Jeane offered us. Here they are:

1. Jeane knows virtually all the Santa Cruz in-depth. Yep, every neighborhood, traffic pattern, noisy neighbors, quiet neighbors, good schools, bad schools, personalities in Capitola and Santa Cruz planning and building departments, water tables in various areas (really) – local associations, minute regulations and restrictions etc. To accurate my point, she even knew about CC&R’s from an old homeowner’s association for our street that were not found in the title report!

2. Jeane is a client first, high integrity, almost at fault. Santa Cruz is full of homes with problems and Jeane’s approach is to look out for her client’s best interest and seems to be more focused on guiding clients away from a bad purchase rather than selling or hustling them into a purchase in order to receive commission.

3. Communication was easy and fast. Jeane typically responded to all our emails, texts or phone call either immediately or within a few hours. Jeane is also super friendly all the time. In fact, at first, I must admit that I initially thought she was “just another super admirable broker with great people skills and that was her only strength.” It was a wonderful surprise to see how she combined this strength with deep analytical skills.

4. Closet Architect. Jeane has remodeled and developed and number of homes and quickly sees what can practically be done to cost-effectively upgrade a house. She can also rapidly assess costly potential issues with foundations, mold etc.

5. Rental experience. Jeane has managed Santa Cruz rentals of her own for many years and provided us with tons of valuable insights on how to set up, manage and optimize a vacation rental.

6. Relationships with Other Brokers – Jeane seemed to have long-standing relationships with the majority of the seller’s brokers and was able to obtain lots of valuable information about sellers’ motivations and timing.

7. Attention to Detail – One of the most valuable things about working with Jeane is how thorough she was in attending to every detail of the contract and all the literally hundreds of pages of disclosures and reports. She was able to catch lots of errors and potential problems and direct our attention to issues that we didn’t notice at first. I think Jeane must have spent dozens of hours reviewing all the documents.

8. Goes the Extra Mile – This is the most amazing part. It seemed that whenever we had a question or need Jeane would immediately “jump on it” and if she didn’t know the answer, she would get it. For instance, when we looked at one house that had a carport we casually wondered if it could be converted into a garage. To our surprise, Jeane went to the Capitola planning department the next morning and provided us with detailed explanation of the regulations and possibilities. This is just one of the countless examples of how she would track down any and all information related to a property.

Jeane MacKenzie has represented us on two home purchases here in Santa Cruz during the last 15 years. She did an amazing job representing us and we would highly recommend her. She has over 35 years of real estate experience and is very knowledgeable about the Santa Cruz real estate market not only as a Realtor but also as a local homeowner, residential property landlord and vacation rental owner. The combination of her market knowledge, honesty and high ethical standards was invaluable in helping us analyze potential property purchase. Her low-pressure approach gave us :space” to objectively evaluate our property selections without distraction. She works competently with other Realtors such that our interests and concerns were effectively represented leading to a successful purchase of our beach home and rental property. Finally, Jeane was a pleasure to work with.