52 Time June 20/June 27, 2022
WHO THEY ARE
WHAT THEY WANTED
WHAT THEY GOT
HOW THEY DID IT
LasT year, KaTie manciLLa was Living
with her husband Tony Mancilla in Los An-
geles, but her heart was in Tampa. “I moved
there during a very tough time in my life,” she
says of the Florida city where she’d resided in
- “It helped me get through a lot.”
But she didn’t want to live just anywhere
in Tampa. She wanted to live in Palma Ceia,
a coveted neighborhood of homes well over
$1 million, but with a pocket of small bun-
galows, some listed within the couple’s
$800,000 budget.
“I love a home with a little bit more char-
acter,” Katie, 38, says of the bungalows, many
built in the 1920s. She works in digital mar-
keting; Tony, 35, works in health technology.
House hunting in one of the hottest mar-
kets in the country is hard. Doing it while liv-
ing 2,500 miles away is even harder. How do
you find a home when all you have to go on are
the Zillow pictures?
So they leaned on their real estate agent,
Devan Weisser of Century 21 List with Beg-
gins. She became their eyes on the ground,
giving them Face Time tours of properties and
making snap decisions on their behalf. “She
would walk into some of these properties and
say, ‘This just isn’t you,’ ” Katie says.
In October 2021, the couple flew into
Tampa for a weekend, touring half a dozen
properties. None was right. Many were new
construction that felt sterile and lacked the
character Katie craved. Ready to give up on
the idea of a single- family home in Tampa, the
couple looked at a condo apartment. But it was
run-down and felt depressing. They left Tampa
dejected and raw. “I was kind of at my wit’s
end,” Katie says. “I had mentally backed out.”
But the next day, Weisser spotted another
real estate agent’s Insta gram Stories teas-
ing a bungalow that she had not listed yet.
Located across the street from where Katie
once lived, and a block from a park, it was
perfect for the Mancillas, Weisser knew. At
a private open house exclusively for bro-
kers, Weisser gave the Mancillas a Face Time
tour, urging the couple to make an offer fast.
“It was very, very charming,” says Weisser,
who had helped Katie find her first home in
Tampa back in 2014. “It had an old-school
feel about it.”
During the open house, Weisser spotted
a photograph of the sellers and realized they
were family friends with her husband. Now
she had an edge: she knew
what made the seller tick.
The property, which
would soon be listed for
$659,000, had five offers
within three hours of the
broker’s open house. But
Weisser knew that the sellers
were a family- oriented cou-
ple invested in the historic
nature of the community,
details she thought would
give her clients a leg up.
“This is a very special place
to me, and I wanted to keep
it that way,” Katie says. “A lot
of people would have taken
that lot and built a $2 million
home on it.”
Weisser is convinced
that commitment helped
put the Mancillas’ $725,000
offer over the top. “How do
you stand out in a market?”
she says. “We went a step
further.”
The sellers accepted. They
closed in November.