I have purchased 6 properties before, one of them a 4-flat that I lived in for a while and then rented out my unit after moving to another place. I am not a first-time buyer. Yet right before we’re ready to leave and start our search for our piece of Scottsdale real estate, I started getting buyer’s remorse.
I was worrying how my income dropped from the prior year (which was my best year ever, but I expected to beat that). And it dropped big-time, by about half! I couldn’t help but remember the gloom and doom writings of some well respected real estate gurus telling us that “we ain’t seen nothing yet.” What if my income was cut in half again in 2009? Could we still afford it?
I wasn’t so worried that what I bought would drop in value since we planned on keeping it for at least 10 years, if not more. So that wasn’t the issue. My fear was that although we kept saying this was an investment, it was really just a 2nd home.
A true investment doesn’t sit empty for most of the year collecting dust. A good real estate investment pays for itself as a rental (and then some). So to me this was an extravagance, not an investment.
My husband doesn’t want to rent it out if we don’t feel the need to. Let’s face it, when you’ve got brand new furniture and carpeting, it’s hard to let strangers use and abuse it. I get the heebie jeebies at hotels, too. I try never to walk on floors with my bare feet and try not to sit on the bedspreads, even fully clothed. I’ll pull down the bedspread and sit on the sheets – hoping they’ve really been washed.
So even though I was gung ho on renting it out to snowbirds until we’re ready to retire, I also feel ambivalent about renting out our baby to strangers. But can we and should we accept a vacant piece of property that just sits there for our part-time pleasure? Are we nuts?!
So I confessed to my fellow Internet friends, agents and webmasters
Many of them told me of their second homes and how happy they were with them. No one tried to talk me out of it. They did make me feel better, but I still had that funny feeling taking over the excitement I had been living for a couple weeks as we were getting closer to our Scottsdale trip.
Should we really go through with this? Should we call the search off? Should I sheepishly call my agent and tell her to forget about it? To be continued…
[...] Buyer’s remorse! (to be continued) Posted in Searching for a Scottsdale condo on May 14th, 2009 by judyo [...]
[...] already wrote about the short time of buyer’s remorse I went through before going ahead with our Scottsdale condominium purchase. Fortunately, it was [...]