Remember back in the day when Welcome Wagon representatives would make “house calls” to new homeowners and renters, welcoming them to the neighborhood with gifts and coupons from local businesses? No? Well, perhaps that’s because in 1998 the company replaced the in-person welcomes with mailings, purportedly due to an increase in two-income families that resulted in fewer people at home to accept the visits. But the basic Welcome Wagon concept, conceived by Memphis (Tennessee) marketing man Thomas Biggs in 1928, proved sound, historically inspired by stories of early Conestoga “welcome wagons” greeting westward travelers and providing them with fresh food and water for the journey. Following suit, Biggs sought friendly, neighborhood-knowledgeable women as “hostesses” to personally deliver the gift baskets to new residents. (Interestingly, Welcome Wagon eventually evolved into one of the first all-female American companies.)
Fast forward to a BWNA board meeting last winter, when a proposal was floated (by yours truly, who as a newlywed was on the receiving end of a much-appreciated Welcome Wagon apartment visit) to organize and implement a “New Neighbor Welcoming Project” for Beaumont-Wilshire, a neighborhood with no shortage of newcomers to welcome. While the board was supportive of the idea, the devil lay in the details: how would newcomers be identified, what would the welcome entail, and who would do the welcoming? For help in identifying newcomers, BWNA turned to former board member and retired Windermere broker Sally Baker, who utilized her real estate contacts to facilitate an agreement with First American Title to provide monthly lists of names and addresses of B-W residents with new titles of ownership. As for welcoming gifts, Beaumont Business Association (BBA) President Andy Frazier got the ball rolling by lining up BBA members willing to sign on to a discount card. Lastly, BWNA board members volunteered to make the home visits. The project was launched at the end of 2019, with packets including letters of welcome from BWNA and BBA presidents and discount cards good at over 30 local businesses and organizations. Welcomers found that surprised and grateful newcomers often invited them in for a cordial chat. The program looked promising.
Then came the pandemic, and home visits came to a screeching halt. So what then? Answer: reinvention. It was decided that distribution of welcome packets would be resumed by mail for the duration of the COVID crisis. Recipients would be asked to confirm via phone or e-mail that they had received their packets and were encouraged to offer questions and comments regarding the neighborhood, BWNA, BBA, or any aspect of the project. But a logistical problem remained to be resolved: the lists provided by First American Title did not differentiate between newcomer, refinancer, and developer, resulting in hit-and-miss welcomes (e.g., “Welcome to the neighborhood! No? Oh, I see, you’ve lived here for 20 years and just recently refinanced”). To the rescue came Moran Homes Windermere real estate broker Jamie Van Hoorn (her ad premiers on page 4 in this issue), who had just recently moved into the B-W neighborhood from Rose City Park.
Jamie volunteered to arrange for the new resident lists showing only transfers of ownership, not refinances, and she would extrapolate from there to separate newcomers from “investors.” Soon after, mailings began.
Still, the surest way of identifying newcomers is for their neighbors (or the newcomers themselves)—be they homeowners or renters—to alert BWNA. Please relay newcomer contact information via editor@bwnapdx.org and anticipate a friendly welcome. Big thanks!