Won't You Be My Agent? (Or Maybe Not.)
Thoughts on the house search, homebuying process, and the housing crisis
I’ve written a bit here about looking for and buying a house in Northern Virginia. But I haven’t yet done a full piece on it, of the sort I kept saying I would do during our search. “I have to write about this!” I kept saying, as I discovered the indignities of the process—being told it’s okay if some appliances are broken because you’re going to rip out and remodel the kitchen anyway, for example—and the shocking lack of attention to the condition of $800,000 houses—finding, for example, a broken (haunted?) soft-touch drawer that pulled shut and slammed all on its own.
Sometimes, however, it was fun. Like many house-searching couples, we window-shopped well above our price range. Perhaps nowhere else than Northern Virginia or California can someone under 30 walk into a $2.5 million house in sweatpants and a t-shirt and be taken seriously as a customer. Oh—in that $2.5 million house:
And a few more things in one nearly $800,000 house that sold in just a couple of days for more than $30,000 over the asking price:
I inventoried all of these little anecdotes throughout our search, so I will just give them to you here in one place. But first, one important bit.
There is a standard contract that virtually all Northern Virginia realtors will ask you to sign, possibly just to tour houses with them, but definitely to submit offers with them. It is a creation of the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors, and is a mix of bits and pieces of housing law along with clauses which are written by and protect the industry. Some realtors will tell you the contract is required by law, which is not strictly true (I spoke to a lawyer).
Among other things, it protects the realtor from a sale behind their back very broadly: as written, the buyer would owe their former realtor a commission on a house sale, even after expiration of the contract. Even—as generally filled in, in a crucial blank pace—on a sale in another state. Everyone will tell you it does not really mean this. And it probably doesn’t, really. But do you want to be the guy who tests it in court?
This is often filled in simply as “property” or “residential real-estate.” Realtors are fine limiting it to “Real estate in Northern Virginia,” but will resist limiting it to specific addresses of specific homes. Which means you would technically owe your realtor a commission on a home they never showed you.
Also this:
The realtor will fill in 30-90 days in that blank above, and will often just put generic “property” in that “Purpose” clause. As written, it’s very hostile to the customer. If you try to get them to alter these blanks very much, you’ll get a runaround. The gist of it is “There’s no reason to limit it because it isn’t bad for you/doesn’t really mean anything.” I dunno—I don’t like signing things that don’t mean anything.
And now, the litany of indignities.
We were advised, at one point, to waive our inspection on a house on which we were making an offer. We were not willing to do that; so we were advised to block off an extra-long house tour window, hire an inspector to do an inspection, and then submit an offer with the inspection contingency waived. We did not win the offer; the inspection, of course, was non-refundable. This is a reflection on the market, not the agent, but it gives you a sense of how the buyer uniquely loses in this process.
We almost minorly injured ourselves in multiple open houses. My wife opened the door of a fireplace cover, only for the entire door/frame assembly to separate from the fireplace and almost fall on her foot. In another house, two pieces of a bannister railing had begun to come apart, exposing a sharp piece of metal, on which I almost cut myself. I alerted the realtor, and his first words were “That’s not metal.” In more than one house, I nearly had worn-out windows slam down on my hands guillotine-style. It was clear to me that many realtors did not bother with even the most minimal inspection of the everyday fixtures and moving parts in houses.
We were noticed by multiple realtors in open houses for trying windows, cabinets, faucets, etc. As a sort of corollary to the point above, most home buyers, apparently, do not perform these basic checks.
One realtor, in reassuring us that waiving an inspection was safe, told us he could spot major problems with a house, including a story in which he climbed into an attic, spotted sawed-off roof beams, and negotiated repairs in the tens of thousands. The standard NVAR contract, meanwhile, explicitly states that realtors do not and should not be seen as giving legal, construction, or any other advice aside from their immediate, narrow job:
A surprising number of houses had non-functional windows. Some were, as noted, worn out and would slide shut once opened. Others were painted shut or otherwise frozen shut. Several would not lock, because of a combination of misalignment and very cheap plastic parts. (I assume these could be made to lock with just the right touch, but maybe not.)
One expensive house had a significant addition. I asked the realtor when the addition was added, and she had no idea. In general, realtors seemed to know very little about the houses they were selling.
At our closing, we were offered two different closing dates by the title company and chose the earlier one. That one—not conveyed to us—involved the agent traveling a few miles, which involved a ludicrously inflated fee.
My general impression is that in all of this, the customer comes last. Nobody in the entire process meaningfully represents or advocates for the buyer. Transparency is observed in the breach. Sellers are required to sign a “disclosure” form, which is basically the opposite—it makes no promises or guarantees of anything, and amounts to the seller claiming no knowledge of the house they have lived in and are selling. This is the most money you will ever spend, and you have far less recourse as a homebuyer than you do as a customer at Walmart or McDonald’s. Or as a bank account or credit card holder.
As is normal today in Northern Virginia, all of these houses were in the range of $750,000-$850,000. This is, in fact, the low end of the range for a house in the city of Alexandria or Arlington County. It is somewhere around the middle in Fairfax County.
Having gone through this process, I can completely understand why “realtors bad, real-estate bad, builders bad, developers bad” is the default position of a lot of people regarding all of this. It’s true, of course, that the house they live in was built by a developer (most likely), sold by a realtor, etc. But that feels abstract compared to being ripped off and rushed through the most consequential purchase of your life. The awfulness of the process, and its seeming inability to be reformed, can reinforce the attitude of “screw you, I got mine.”
Certainly, many people come away with a poor impression of the honesty and professionalism of the real-estate industry and its related industries (home inspectors, title agents, etc.). And it is intuitive to think of the pro-housing cause as a special interest of realtors or builders. But most of what’s bad about buying a house is buying a house in a hot market. And the market is hot in large part because we don’t build enough. This is the key thing I’ve come to understand, and which is really not obvious to a layman simply trying to find a place to live.
It’s interesting: things that are accidental elements of the market come to feel like inherent characteristics—and we respond to these accidents with more of the very things that give rise to them. “Let’s not build anything, that’ll show those greedy developers!”
The thing is, this is almost certainly what I would have come away thinking from the homebuying process were I not also following housing and development issues. In fact, my being a housing advocate and observer of land use issues helped us in our process. People told us: Wait to buy, the prices will come down. It’s a bubble. When interest rates go up, prices go down—it’s a law of economics.
It turned out none of those things were really true, at least here in the D.C.-area housing market. Prices have barely budged; houses still sell quickly over asking; interest rates are now higher. In effect, prices have continued to climb. I knew this would happen because of what I know about housing, land use, and development here. I know that whatever manipulation and dishonesty there is arises out of a constrained supply of housing. People who did not understand that predicted things that did not happen.
They believe, rather, that real estate is a cartel, and that the prices are basically fake. That housing is like diamonds and housing prices are like De Beers marketing. To the extent that this is true, it arises out of a constrained market in the first place.
Buying a house in this market and this region, and having correctly predicted how inelastic its high prices would be, has only made me more convinced that we need to build a hell of a lot more.
Related Reading:
New Construction Blues, Northern Virginia Edition
The Thanksgiving Table and the Settlement Table
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It is absolutely fascinating how the bigger the purchase, the seemingly less leverage and information you get. That continues post-home purchase when you need to replace your roof or siding, for example. There's a big sense of "trust us" without a whole lot of anything to back that up. Also agreed on the poor state of homes in NoVA. Lack of maintenance or upkeep is rampant in older homes (wonder if that will change now that we're all working from home) and on those new developments you're referencing, everything is vinyl even in a $2M home.
For further reading, I recommend the book A Nation Of Realtors: A Cultural History Of The Twentieth-century American Middle Class. The book examines how realtors transformed their occupation into a profession ("professional entrepreneurs"), and influenced zoning and housing policy.
I went through the buying process a few years ago. It seems like one of those life events like funerals or weddings where the buyer is at a huge disadvantage. Knowledge only gets you so far.
I was struck by the fact that you end up buying a house with less due diligence than a fridge or washing machine. How much can you really learn in a one hour visit? And I bet most people don’t even use most of the visit...
I was truly disappointed when we scheduled a 2 hour home inspection and showed up 45 minutes into it. The inspector was already done and chatting happily with the selling agent. All they really tell you is that the house is structurally sound. They specifically don’t tell you about what you’ll need to fix.
One note: it’s legally better for all involved not to know too much. If they do know it, they could be sued for non-disclosure.
My wife told me at the beginning two things: 1) don’t believe the real estate crash predictors, we just need to buy something; 2) expect to spend $100k on home upgrades in the first few years. Both were correct.