When the Dream and The Plan Don't Match

By Kelly DeBrosse | eXp Realty | 23+ years serving Raleigh, Wake & surrounding counties

A few years ago, during one of the hottest real estate markets I can remember, I received a phone call from a buyer who was more than a little panicked. He wanted to make an offer on a house, there was an offer deadline, and he felt like his agent was not moving quickly enough to get the offer written. He had reached out to friends for advice, and they suggested that he call me.

I happened to be in the car when he called, so I could not pull up the listing or start digging through the details on a computer. I just started asking questions.

When is the offer deadline?

Three hours.

What is happening with your current agent?

As he explained the situation, I realized I knew the lead agent of the team his agent worked with, so I felt comfortable that I could have that conversation if necessary. But before I did anything, I needed to understand the property and the offer he was trying to make.

What is the house listed for?

What are you planning to offer?

There was about a $20,000 difference between those two numbers.

This was around 2022. Homes were routinely receiving multiple offers, buyers were competing aggressively, and this particular seller had already established an offer deadline. Suddenly I had a much better understanding of why his very young, relatively inexperienced agent may have been hesitant to write the offer. What I did not think had happened, however, was a clear enough conversation with the buyer about the situation he was actually facing.

He did not need someone to simply type up an offer in the next three hours. He needed to understand what a multiple-offer situation meant, how his proposed offer would likely be viewed, and why offering $20,000 below the asking price in that particular market was probably not going to accomplish what he hoped it would.

We did not move forward with that house.

Instead, we regrouped and started looking at other properties together. As I got to know him better, I also began to understand that buying a house was not really the most important part of his goal. He had recently separated, and what mattered most to him was remaining close to his child. He wanted evenings and weekends together. He wanted to be able to pick his child up from school, take him to school when needed, and be close enough that spending time together did not require planning an entire trip.

That was the dream.

The problem was that the area around his child's school was expensive, and his budget simply did not fit very well with what homes were selling for there.

At one point in the search, he nearly purchased a very low-end condo. It technically moved him closer to the goal because it was something he could afford in the general area, but I was concerned that the condition of the property and the likely future expenses were going to turn it into a money pit. I was very relieved when that purchase did not happen.

Then, a week or so later, he sent me another house he was interested in.

This one was about 15 miles away from the area he had originally told me he needed to be.

Fifteen miles does not sound like much when you are simply looking at a map. But when the reason you are buying a home is so that you can quickly pick up your child, bring him home, get him from school, take him to school, or spend an ordinary weeknight together, 15 miles can change the entire lifestyle.

The house may have worked.

The location did not work for the life he had described to me.

That became the point where I think we ultimately parted ways as agent and client. It was his decision to make, and I would never suggest otherwise. My job was not to tell him where he was allowed to live or whether he should buy a particular house. But I also could not enthusiastically encourage him to make a purchase that seemed to contradict the one thing he had consistently told me mattered most.

My job is not to talk you into or out of a real estate decision. My job is to make sure you understand enough about the decision to make the best one for your situation.

Sometimes that means helping someone understand why an offer probably will not compete. Sometimes it means looking beyond the purchase price and recognizing that an inexpensive property could become very expensive after you own it. Sometimes it means pointing out that the house someone can afford is far enough away that it changes the lifestyle they were trying to create in the first place.

And sometimes, after all of that information is on the table, the best decision is not to buy a house at all.

In the end, this buyer rented.

I do not consider that an unsuccessful outcome.

Homeownership had become the plan, but being close to his child was the dream. At that particular point in his life and in that particular market, renting gave him a better opportunity to protect what actually mattered to him than forcing a purchase simply because buying had been the original goal.

I see versions of this more often than people might expect. Someone comes to me with a picture in their mind of what they want to do, and then we start putting real information around it. We look at the market, the numbers, the timing, the location, the condition of the property, the alternatives and, most importantly, what they are actually trying to accomplish.

Sometimes everything lines up beautifully.

And sometimes the dream and the plan do not match.

That does not necessarily mean the dream has to change. Sometimes it simply means we need a different plan.