Real estate makes it easy to treat a community as a market — a set of boundaries, comparables, and school ratings. We've never been able to see it that way. These are the neighborhoods where we've raised our children, coached weekend games, sat through board meetings, and watched families we sold to become families we know and call friends.
That involvement was never a business strategy. It's simply how we've lived here for more than two decades. It has shaped the way we practice: when you're genuinely part of a place, you understand it differently, and you have more at stake in getting things right for the people who choose to live there.
Our roots run deep in Irvine. Rachel served as PTA President, Treasurer, and Executive Vice President at Alderwood Elementary; Doug served on the School Site Board. Between them, they've coached or supported more than a dozen basketball, soccer, and baseball teams. Doug has served as President, Secretary, and Treasurer of the Quail Hill HOA, and currently serves as President of the Hidden Canyon HOA, where Rachel sits on the Board's Social Committee.
None of it was glamorous. Most of it was volunteer hours on weeknights. That's rather the point.
In 2007, Doug and Rachel collected signatures from more than 250 Quail Hill residents to found a 20 Seasons, because their kids needed one and no one else was going to build it.
Their children aged out of the program years ago.
Doug and Rachel are still at the meets. Still at the end-of-year party. 20+ seasons in.
That's not a credential. It's just the answer to what happens when the reason you got involved goes away and your love for it remained, so you stayed.
In 2017, Doug and Rachel established an annual scholarship for graduating seniors at University High School, recognizing students who pair academic achievement in the sciences with meaningful service to others.
It's a small award in the scheme of things. But it exists every year, without announcement, because the two qualities it honors — rigor and generosity — are the ones we most want to see in the next generation of people who'll call this place home.
As our work has extended into Newport Coast, Corona del Mar, and Shady Canyon, our involvement has followed it there.
Swardstrom Group is a proud sponsor of Newport Coast Elementary and Bonita Canyon Elementary PTA and we look forward to many years of service to these communities.
The Longer Measure
We'd like the record of this business to include the homes we sold, but also the 20 Seasons still running, the students who received a scholarship, the organizations and local businesses that got a little stronger because someone stayed involved after the interesting part was over.
That's the harder thing to build, and it's the one worth building.
Looking for the right neighborhood? Let's talk about what actually makes a place feel like home.