Just stop: No one wants your home-buying advice | Opinion

I was standing in the foyer of a dilapidated Allentown house with a handful of other homebuyers when I finally grasped the breathtaking extent of the national housing crisis. The apologetic listing agent told us about the known problems, including a collapsed wall, black mold, rotting facade, irreparable flooring, and mysterious holes punched and kicked into every wall. The home was only 14 years old and needed an estimated $80,000 in repairs but was listed at $415,000. The agent received more than a dozen offers that day.

The current housing market is a spectacle of privilege that is only accessible to investors, or those with existing assets or generational wealth. What makes an awful situation much worse is the continuously bad advice of well-intentioned friends and family who think they can help their loved ones navigate an impossibly complex and systemically broken process.

“Never waive the inspection,” says the uncle on a Facebook post.

“Wait it out a few more months. The bubble will pop,” says the coworker behind the cubicle wall.

“If you offer more than the appraisal, you’ll have to pay in cash!” shouts the friend who last bought a house in 2011.

While these are sane suggestions, they are useless in a market that has gone mad. Giving advice to a homebuyer right now is like trying to shout maneuvering instructions to a person who is sinking in quicksand — it is unhelpful at best and counterproductive at worst. That’s because the intuitive and logical truths we have believed about real estate are now turned completely upside down.

In January I sold my Germantown home to relocate to the Lehigh Valley to resume shared custody of my 10-year-old daughter. Like almost everyone else participating in the real estate equivalent of Mad Max: Fury Road, I am compelled by absolute necessity, not desire. A recent NPR story detailed the upsetting phenomenon of families living in cars, hotels, and storage units so that they could maintain residency in the desirable Parkland School District in Allentown. Unfortunately, this has been happening for years.

The reality of buying a house in 2022 is that ethics, morality, and common sense are not useful tools in the hand-to-hand combat of bidding on a house. If you have a friend or family member going through this process, you’ve likely heard only a fraction of their experience because the process is enough to drive people catatonic. I delivered updates to loved ones in frenzied, incoherent bursts via group chat, none of the pieces adding up to a clear picture of what I was experiencing.

The roots of the housing crisis are fundamentally the same forces that created other systemic inequities, including the OG 2007 housing-bubble burst, racist zoning practices, chronic disinvestment in Black and brown school districts, and the paradigm-busting COVID-19 pandemic. The wild card that most people forgot to account for on their 2022 Bingo Cards was the slow-moving train wreck of the country’s housing problems resulting in an inventory shortage of 5 million houses.

Given these complexities, most of the advice you try to give will only serve to hurt your homebuyer friends. Take, for example, the long-held belief that the runaway real estate market is a bubble that will soon pop, leaving buyers upside down on their mortgages. Unfortunately, this concept was so wrong that many buyers who were ready to purchase in 2021 are now faced with interest rates a whole percentage point higher, with the same or less inventory available.

» READ MORE: Home buyers, don’t count on sellers to read the letters you write

Want to share your competitive bidding tips? All right, hit me with your best shot. Now, line that up against a cash offer, no contingencies, $50,000 above the list price with a 30-day close. It sounds insane and infinitely risky, but that’s the exact bid that got my family into our current home. We also made a bet that the appraisal would meet the sale price (it did) and we wrote a heartfelt letter about the future we envisioned with our family there. We weren’t the highest bidder, but the seller was moved by our story. (But this isn’t advice either, as heartfelt letters won’t always get you the house.)

All is fair in love and war, and the real estate market is a battleground where nothing makes sense. If you want to know the best way to help a homebuyer friend during this awful experience, just listen without adding your useless two cents — and maybe bring a bottle of wine.

Florence Brown is a strategic communications consultant and mom of two living in Fogelsville, Pa.