(00:00) [Music] Welcome to the Deerwood Realty YouTube channel. I'm John Schink, founder and managing broker of Deerwood Realty in St. Louis, Missouri. You know, as a buyer agent, right, like to get more business, you would want to do a good job for your buyers, right? You'd want your buyers to always be happy with your services, at least that's the thought. As the longer I go in business, the longer I'm starting to question everything. But anyway, so if people were upset with your services, do you think they would use you again? Well, I saw this article, and it's... I might have even done a video on it a while back. This is not new information, but I thought we should go over it today because, well, why not? Because the numbers are just ridiculous. Let's get started here. Here it is. I saw it on Yahoo Finance. I saw it actually, Unusual Whales tweeted it yesterday, and I just... I thought it was fantastic. So here's what it says. It says, "93% of home buyers have regrets about purchasing a house in 2023." 93%! Talk about buyer's remorse, my gosh! And I feel weird because I've helped buyers buy houses this year, and they don't seem to be part of the 93%, and I'm a little bit... I'm questioning, I guess, the nuances because when I bought my house, I was uncomfortable with the price, and that was, oh gosh, that was like 10 years ago or more, right? I didn't like to spend that kind of money. I didn't want to spend that kind of money on the house, but then, you know, as time has gone on, it's turned out to be a very decent purchase. I mean, I'm not... I mean, I'm not disappointed, but let me go through this. I would say this: I think I should have bought a house with a two-car garage. I have one car garage, and then I ended up with a family, and it's like not great. There's remorse. Also, would not have bought a house that's got a tree, the neighbor's tree, like a 60ft oak tree next to my house, so that every time I go outside, there's like acorns and bird droppings all over my car. That would be another... that would be another regret, right? So, I guess, I mean, I have some remorse, but at the same time, I really like my house. I really like the location, and I've made it my own, and it's not enough to make me feel like down about it. So, I don't know. This is very interesting. 93% of home buyers having regrets. How much of that is normal? How serious are the regrets? Let's get into it.

(02:51) It says, "According to the new study by Clever Real Estate, I believe they're a discount online brokerage, a whopping 93% of recent home buyers and 95% of home sellers have regrets, up from 72% and 90% in 2022, respectively." Now, think about that. Recent home buyers are 93%, and 95% of home sellers. Now, how can you have regrets over the last two years as a home seller? Crazy. "More than half of home buyers have felt in over their heads financially since purchasing their home. Almost 2/3, 62%, have struggled to make mortgage payments on time." Now, that's not a good start if you're already having trouble making mortgage payments now. Now, I don't think that's wrong to struggle to make payments. I'm a little concerned because, I don't know exactly when this started, but we had low mortgage rates for a long time. If you're struggling with low mortgage rates, when they get higher, it's even worse. "More than one in four recent home buyers claim their overall financial situation and their debt burden have gotten worse since purchasing a home." I don't know, that's a claim. Your financial situation and debt burden will get worse. I mean, if you had zero debt and now you purchased a house, you have more debt. Your debt burden's bigger, right? If you bought a car and you bought a house, now you've got a bigger debt burden. So, I don't really see that that's unusual. I mean, it should be actually 100%. "More than half of home buyers have taken on additional debt to maintain their lifestyle." I don't know what that means either. I mean, if you bought a house and you used a mortgage, then you've taken on additional debt to maintain your lifestyle, but actually, you've improved your lifestyle if you bought a decent house, right? "Nearly all recent buyers, 93%, say the real estate market impacted their home buying experience, compared to 88% in 2022." Now, what does that mean? What does that mean? 93% of the real estate, say the real estate market impacted their home buying experience. Obviously, it would impact your home buying experience. It should be 100%. Anytime you buy a house, the real estate market does matter. And by impact, I mean, you know, we don't know about if it's negatively or positively, and why that number went up, I mean, it's even more bizarre.

(05:23) So anyway, let's get to some of the reasons why people are having regrets. It says, "My home requires too much maintenance." According to the survey, a third of recent home buyers feel remorse about the upkeep their home needs, compared to 25% in 2022. It's so strange, like, why... I mean, it requires too much maintenance. I don't understand, like, you didn't realize you were going to have to have maintenance on a house? "I spent too much." Roughly 38% of home buyers said they paid over the asking price in 2023, including 42% of first-time buyers, according to the Clever survey. Well, paying more than asking and spending too much can be two different things, right? So, I don't really know that that even makes a lot of sense. You spent too much, you didn't have a choice, in theory. If whole prices were very, very high and you wanted to buy a house, you would have spent too much, but what were you going to do? "My interest rate was too high." This is kind of fascinating. As Forbes noted, rates rose to 6.96% by mid-July, and many experts predict they'll remain above 6% for the rest of the year. I think we're at like 7.4% as of today, so yeah, I mean, if your interest rate was too high, then it's really, really too high now. "I bought a fixer-upper." This is a very fascinating thing that I see a lot of first-time home buyers do. It says, "26% of respondents said buying a fixer-upper was their biggest regret. Properties that need repairs appeal to first-time buyers because they usually come at a lower purchase price, but the time and money needed to make the repairs aren't always easy to estimate accurately." I have a little way that I can go and estimate a home repair or remodel pretty easily. Like, I know exactly how I would set it up. I set every room in like a box, so the kitchen is a box, and the bathroom is a box, and then I assign a price to those repairs, and usually, I get pretty close. Now, things are very, very much more expensive than the last time I really, really looked, you know, at what, like, looked at it that way, as if I were a buyer. But still, I mean, it's a very easy way to do it, and just come up with a number. If you think your kitchen's going to cost, like, what do you think a kitchen is going to cost? $30,000 to remodel now? You just add $30,000. What you'll find a lot of times with the houses that I've seen is the amount of work that you would need to fix up the houses on a fixer-upper, it's going to cost you more than if you just bought a house that was already fixed. That's what I've seen a lot in my career. And I don't know if you're a first-time home buyer, if you're a young family starting out, and now you've got a house that's kind of got shackles around your neck, I mean, I don't know that that's a good plan. A lot of people come to me at first and say, you know, "I think I'd like a fixer-upper. I'd like to buy something cheap and just make it my own." And there's nothing wrong with that, but I do think people are a little bit naive as to how much work is actually needed. And then finally, "I was pressured to make an offer." With prospective homeowners being priced out of the market like never before, dealing with increased house prices and mortgage rates, plus a volatile market, have forced many to jump before they're ready. Well, that's very interesting, and I'm not trying to defend anybody or complain about anything, but look, if you bought a house, wouldn't you have had to have been ready? Because you bought the house. Like, you officially bought the house. You were ready because you got one. You're not ready if you don't get a house. See how it's... you can just kind of... it's just odd.

(09:23) So anyway, as far as being pressured to make an offer, during the good times of the, you know, for the sellers, the last couple of years, you could, as a buyer's agent, you literally go to a house and tell the people they have about 20 minutes to make a decision because we need to write an offer and get it out there. And then people didn't like that, and I don't blame them. And so then we had, they started setting deadlines for offers. And so you call the listing agent and say, "Well, how many offers do you have?" That's never a good thing. That's never good for negotiations for the buyer. And then they'd be like, "30. We have 30 offers." And you say, "Well, I don't know that my offer is going to be the best." And so I can understand. I can understand why you would be uncomfortable there. Pressured to make an offer, though, I try not to ever do that with my buyers, ever. I mean, I tell them, like, "We probably have, you know, we probably have a couple hours here where we can make a decision," or like, "Sometimes I'll be like, 'You can sleep on it overnight, you know, let me know what you think in the morning.'" I try. I thought this was kind of interesting at the end here. It says, "Rounding out the regrets, buyers had about their home buying experience had more to do with preferences and pressure to buy than prices and rates." "I don't like my home's location" was 22%. Think about that. You bought a house, and you don't like the location. Now, how do I fix that as a buyer agent? I tell people, "Look, drive around the... I mean, when we make an offer, okay, drive around the neighborhood, see if you like it. Like, pretend that you get up one morning early and pretend that you're going to your job from this new house. What is that like? Is it okay? Is it acceptable? Because if it's not, you know, we're out. We're leaving. We're leaving." I mean, that's the way it is. But I don't think many people do that. "I don't like my neighbors." I often talk to buyers, and I say, "Look to the left and look to the right. Are either of these houses, like, you know, a meth dealer?" Sometimes they're hidden, but, you know, neighbors are important, and I can understand why if you don't like your neighbors, you wouldn't like your house. I totally understand that. I, there's neighbors I don't like, and I mean, it's... but it's to me that it's not not liking the neighbors. At some point, they'll move, or I'll move. It's not like it's forever.

(11:15) "I bought sight unseen." Well, you... I have no... I have no sympathy for people who buy houses unseen that are their primary residences. I have no sympathy, none. I don't care if your house is in a different part of the country. I don't care about that at all. I think you go and you physically go see the house before you buy it, ever. Never ever ever ever buy a house sight unseen. It's my opinion, and I don't care if you go on Google. I don't care if you do Matterport. Just don't do it. "I don't like

my home, 15%. Now, what are you doing? You bought a house that you don't like. Whose fault would that be if you bought a house that you didn't like? I mean, I can understand, like, some people buy two-story houses, and then they're like, "I don't really like going upstairs to the bedrooms every day. It's kind of annoying. I don't like the stairs in general." And I get that. I get that. But anyway, as a buyer agent, I don't want any of my buyers to be miserable, so we go through certain things, you know, we have kind of a certain way we do things so that people don't have regrets. And I would say that the people that bought this year on my side, they're not, are not sad. Actually, pretty darn happy.

(12:51) So, with that, I'm going to head on out. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening, and I'll catch you on the next one.