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Good evening, welcome to the Deerwood Realty Show. I'm John Schink, founder and managing broker of Deerwood Realty in St. Louis, Missouri.

You know, I like Twitter—or X as it’s now called. I don't mean to dead name X, but it's just… there's stuff there. So I want to take you into this story that I saw and talk about it. Here we go.

This story just came in this morning. It seemed like no big deal at first, but then… [Music] everything seemed normal, and then, oh my god, what in the world? That house looks kind of pink. It goes a little slower, and then you go back to normal houses. So I was like, wow. And then the caption said, "When you don't have an HOA." That was different.

To me, I was just like, okay… and then I started looking at the comments. People were saying how glad they are that they don't have an HOA, how great it is, how it's really a way to stick it to the man. And I'm sitting there like, I just don't know why someone would want to do such a thing in a subdivision that looks pretty nice. But anyway, there’s a story behind it, so I found the story, and I want to share it with you.

The story says, "Texas man paints entire house pink. I don't know why people don't like it," he says. Now, that's hard for me to believe, because I see it, and it’s really something. He even painted the roof! If you can see in the video, the fence has already been painted too. He writes that he pre-planned this specifically because there’s no HOA. He did the back first, then the whole house. He says, "I love this house. I don't know why people don't like it."

However, a number of neighbors, according to the outlet, are not fans of the unique color. But since there's no HOA, they don’t have much of a say unless they file a lawsuit claiming the pink house brings down the value of neighboring homes. That’s kind of what I was thinking as a real estate agent—why? Why would you do this? It’s weird. It’s strange, right? Maybe you think differently, and that’s okay. Put it in the comments section. I don’t know if I’m going to get attacked on this one or not.

I don't like HOAs myself, but when you don't have an HOA, you can get stuck in a situation where you either have the community, the city, or the municipality making rules, or you have none. I go back and forth on this. This isn’t something I particularly like. I would not be happy if I saw this in my neighborhood. I have my own problems to deal with.

But I had some questions, so I thought I'd go over them with you. One of the questions is: What motivates homeowners to make bold aesthetic choices like painting a house entirely pink? Well, I’m not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but there’s something deeply unwell about the American fabric nowadays. It feels like people want to stand out. They want you to notice them; they want to provoke a reaction from you. They want to be so annoying, so irritable, that you’re upset by it, and they find that fun. I get it—it’s just never been the way I am.

I looked it up, and there is actually a disorder called Histrionic Personality Disorder. Individuals with HPD have a strong desire to be the center of attention and may engage in dramatic, provocative, or overly emotional behaviors to gain approval and validation from others. Well, if you’re living in a normal neighborhood and you paint your house entirely pink, does that qualify as having a strong desire to be the center of attention and engaging in dramatic, provocative, or overly emotional behaviors? It sounds like it.

It’s funny to me because in my own neighborhood, there’s someone who painted their house that stupid shade of white and tried to make a mid-century modern ranch into a craftsman-style home. It was a flipper, and he got paid $200,000 more than anybody else in the neighborhood, but that one house looks so stupid. It’s just bizarre to me.

Another question I have is: How would you feel if your neighbor painted their house a bold color without consulting anyone? Well, you get into this issue of, look, it’s hard to be neighbors with people. They’re just annoying. They do annoying things, and you just have to deal with it because you’re in a neighborhood. If you know that’s coming, you either have to find a place with a super strict HOA that may come after you at some point, or you just have to move out to the middle of nowhere and wall yourself off from the insanity of suburban life.

I don’t feel like it’s my job to tell my neighbor what I’m doing outside. I don’t see that. Do you think homeowners should have complete freedom to alter their home’s appearance, or should there be limitations? I’m all for limitations. I think a pink house in the middle of a bunch of nice houses looks stupid. It’s just what I think.

This story is from 2024, but the first time I saw it was back in 2019. This story is being recycled year after year because it’s so odd. While the homeowner may say, "I don’t understand why people don’t like it," I think that’s disingenuous. I have a hard time believing that he can’t figure out what might be annoying to people.

How do you think such bold home choices affect property values in the neighborhood? Well, when I work with buyers, I tell them to definitely check out the neighbors. The only time you can control what happens to you is when you move in. Once people sell around you, that’s it. But when you move in, if you have somebody next to you with some sort of display that you don’t like—maybe a boat in the front yard, motorcycles doing wheelies in front of your house, it’s just a disaster—you might want to look at a different home.

How does it affect values overall? I think around that particular house, you might get some people who just don’t want to live next to it. But overall, if it’s a 200-home subdivision, I don’t think it’s going to be that bad, especially if you’re nowhere near that house.

Would you ever make a similar decision to stand out? If so, how? This is very interesting and goes to a core problem I have with YouTube. YouTube and social media in general pay for being provocative. The further out from the norm you can get, the more clicks you’re going to get, and the better you’ll do. They call it "doom porn" when you say that things are going down in the housing market over and over again. There are certain people who get paid a fortune every month because they draw stylized headlines about the housing market crashing. Then, when you look at it, you ask, “What do you mean by a crash? How is that defined?” I don’t think house prices can go up forever, but that’s just me. You’re not going to get me to jump out of who I am. It doesn’t mean that much to me.

Would I ever make my house stand out? Well, I do have a light blue door—Carolina blue—but I think it matches with the neighborhood pretty well. I like it; it looks kind of classy. But no, I don’t have the urge to stand out in my neighborhood. It just seems like it attracts unwanted attention.

Finally, as a real estate agent, how would you market a home with such a bold design? That’s interesting. I would lower the price. I would look at the other houses in the neighborhood and then lower the price because the chances of someone wanting to move into that house are so small compared to the amount of available buyers. If they decided not to have it all pink, I don't know. It’s one of those things. I’m confused by it. I don’t understand why people do such things, but I don’t understand why people do a lot of things they do. I thought I’d bring it to you because if I saw it in 2024 and it’s been going on since at least 2019, it’s probably going to get recycled again and again.

Do I think anything should happen to the guy? No. He made his statement.

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Anyway, that’s what I have for you today. Thank you for watching, thank you for listening, and I’ll catch you on the next one. Bye.