I Overpaid for My House, and I'm Glad I Did. Ten years ago, I was getting divorced and needed a new house. One without him in it. I was relatively new to Austin, living in Pemberton Heights with my soon-to-be ex-husband and two young daughters, and desperately wanted to stay in the neighborhood. Then I found a house I loved. Really loved. It was a pocket listing, beautifully done and still in Pemberton, albeit the dodgy end, where the houses are slightly less fabulous. There was one fairly significant problem. It was overpriced. Not unaffordable. I just didn't think it was worth what they were asking. The sellers had a very healthy opinion of their house. Annoyingly, I shared it. Just not quite to the same dollar amount. Unfortunately, I also loved it. So I bought it. At the time, I thought I was buying a beautifully done house in the neighborhood I wanted to stay in. What I hadn't given nearly as much thought to was everything that came with it. The house, it turned out, came with a street. There were children everywhere, usually in varying states of dress, riding anything with wheels, crossing lawns, moving between houses and appearing at one another's doors without formal invitations or advance notice. My front yard had a tree swing, which meant it quickly became part of the neighborhood circuit for anyone who felt inclined to have a go. Apparently my backyard was communal property too. One Sunday morning, four days after I'd had a playset installed, I was woken far too early by the unmistakable sound of children having a marvelous time outside my bedroom window. I looked out and there were two little kids, probably about four, happily playing on it. I had absolutely no idea who they were. I put a gate up shortly afterwards. In fairness, I had just spent a year in a house I didn't want to be in, with somebody I no longer wanted to be married to. What I wanted was a door I could shut. Somewhere nobody could reach me without an appointment. So I was probably not in the ideal frame of mind for a street quite this sociable. It also didn't help that I'm English, which makes one antisocial by default. In London, it is perfectly normal to live next door to somebody for years and take active steps to avoid making eye contact. An unexpected knock at the door can trigger a visceral response: stop, drop and army crawl out of sight until the danger has passed. The gate was optimistic. The tree swing continued to attract children from God knows where, people continued to appear at the door and the whole street carried on behaving as though property boundaries were more of a suggestion. It took me a couple of years to realize the neighbors had been tight long before I arrived. I was the one who had to catch up. And eventually, I did. Not through any great personal growth. I simply ran out of options. I couldn't stop the noise on the street, the front porch conversations that, from the safety of my living room, seemed to go on forever, or the children still out well past what I considered a reasonable hour. I could shut the gate, but I couldn't shut out the commotion. So I went out. My girls, meanwhile, had required no such adjustment period. They had been ready to join in from day one. And join in they did. They learned all sorts of skills on this street, from the innocent and wholesome to the questionable and terrifying. Bikes with stabilizers gave way to riding three-deep on Lime scooters and piling onto the golf cart in numbers it was never designed for. I didn't have to put them in the car every time they wanted to see somebody. They opened the front door and off they went, somewhere between The Goonies and Lord of the Flies. As they got older, went to different schools and made other friends, they stopped needing the street in quite the same way. I didn't. I've clearly gone native. I can't walk the dog without getting into a twenty-minute conversation, and leaving town involves a series of texts about packages, plants and whatever I've convinced myself I may have left switched on. I put up a gate to keep people out. Ten years later, I've given half of them a key. |
Knowingly Would I advise a client against doing what I did? Not necessarily. Which is perhaps a slightly alarming thing for a Realtor to admit immediately after telling you I knowingly paid above market value for my own house. But the important word there is knowingly. There's a difference between accidentally overpaying and deciding, with your eyes open, that a particular house is worth a premium to you. My job is to make sure you know which one you're doing. That means establishing what the evidence says. What exactly are you paying extra for? How difficult would it be to replicate? And what happens if you need to sell in three years rather than ten? Then we get to the irritatingly unquantifiable bit. Is it worth it to you? Because some of the things that affect our lives the most are strangely absent from an MLS sheet. Being the house where everybody somehow ends up. Spending ten minutes less in the car every morning. None of that makes the comps irrelevant. It simply belongs in the decision too. The other problem is that buyers don't always know what they want. Not because they haven't thought about it. Quite the opposite. By the time I meet them, perfectly normal adults have developed deeply held views on grout color, refrigerator panels, the precise warmth of white oak and whether four stools technically fit at a kitchen island if one unfortunate person has to sit around the corner. The primary bedroom must be downstairs. The laundry upstairs. The pantry walk-in. The range 48 inches. And under absolutely no circumstances is anyone buying a house with a vessel sink. Six months earlier, half of them couldn't have identified unlacquered brass in a police lineup. I was one of them. Although, in retrospect, spectacularly basic. I wanted a fresh start. Apparently, I also thought it needed a pool. At the time, the pool was essential. If a house didn't have one, it needed enough room to put one in. Mine did, and I knew exactly where it was going. Ten years later, I still haven't built it. The spot where I was absolutely certain my pool would go now contains fake grass, a trampoline and a paddling pool for the dog. At no point during the last decade have I thought, God, if only I'd built that pool. What I didn't know to ask for was a street where my daughters could open the front door and disappear for hours. I certainly didn't know I wanted neighbors with keys to my house, which at the time would have sounded considerably more like a threat than a selling point. That's why I spend so much time getting to know how my clients actually live rather than simply working through the list they've handed me. What does an ordinary Tuesday look like? What drives them mad about where they live now? What do they wish were easier? Because sometimes the life somebody is trying to create tells you far more than the list. And even then, there are things neither of us could possibly know. If you'd asked me ten years ago what I wanted, I'd have said privacy. Quiet. Nobody dropping by. A good agent would have listened to me, taken me seriously and probably steered me away from the very thing I now value most about where I live. She would have been doing her job properly. She would also have been completely wrong. |
So, Was It Worth It? I paid more than I believed the house was worth, knew perfectly well I was doing it and bought it anyway. But a bargain on the wrong house is still the wrong house. What I got for that premium was ten years on a street where I spent the first two trying to keep everyone out and the next eight being grateful they were there. I didn't win the negotiation. I won the next ten years. Would I trade them for the money I might have saved by walking away? Not a chance. |
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Ten years ago I handed the universe a brief: privacy, quiet, a pool. Nobody on that street paid the slightest attention to it. So yes, I overpaid for the house. I'm fairly certain I got a bargain on everything that came with it. Until next month, Gemma |
P.S. If someone you know is thinking about buying or selling, I'd be grateful for the introduction. I'll take care of them. |
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