(Photo: Adam Amengual)

Kate Pollock and Warren Symon
Schoolteacher, Financial Analyst

Where They Live Now: She’s in a one-bedroom in Prospect Heights; he’s in Gramercy. They plan to move in together, then get out of the city in a year or so. Maybe. “It’s not something we’re sure we want to do,” she says.
What They Want: A two- or three-bedroom house closer to Stamford, Connecticut, where Symon works, so he can trim his awful commute. “I don’t know anything about the suburbs here at all,” says Pollock, who grew up in Ohio. “I just know Riverdale.”
Their Budget: $600,000 to $900,000.
What She Offered: The couple ruled out Jersey and Long Island, because the commute to Stamford wouldn’t work. Bernstein ended up recommending Westport as a starting point, because the surrounding towns tend to be family-centric, and Pollock and Symon don’t have kids. Westport’s well-known bourgeois-bohemian tilt—Paul Newman’s organic restaurant–playhouse is there—means “there’s a lot for transplanted New Yorkers to do. If I’d placed them in Armonk, they’d spend all their weekends working on their house.”
The verdict: Probably not. Though Pollock allowed that the houses were beautiful, “it was like Pleasantville, a little too perfect, too cute,” she says, and not diverse enough. “We’re still very much feeling out the process,” says Symon. “It was good to see a town and use it as a basis for figuring out what we want.”