Affordable Housing Institute : US

All of us have our secret emotional catnip, the object of desire that pierces our reason and instantly renders us no better than small children.  Because the home is so intimately bound up with our sense of personal space, family, and self, especially when large sums are involved, it’s no surprise that the feelings revealed are often very raw, as illustrated in this New York Times article, “My broker, my therapist“:

 

How many square feet in your problem?

 

BROKERS, like therapists, have to understand what buyers really want in order to help them get it. While that might seem easy, it is not, because buyers often don’t know themselves what they would like — hence an old real estate maxim, “Buyers are liars.”

 

That’s imprecise; prospects are fibbers, but buyers speak truth.  While negotiation may involve bluff, the transactional moment — exchange of money for object possession — is the ultimate in speaking truth.

 

Real estate, said Marc Broxmeyer, an owner of Bellmarc Realty, “is probably the largest investment people make, and it brings up many of the issues we bring with us from childhood in terms of whether we’re entitled or spending too much, whether we should spend it now and not save it for later.”

 

Money and desire, expressed in bricks and mortar.  In addition to helping prospects sort out what matters to them, a service provided by brokers — absent in for-sale-by-owner transactions — is interceding between id and id. 

 

Bone on bone = signing pain.

 

In the end, brokers care most that any deal be done, so they are (the embodiment of the difference between dis­interested and uninterested), cynically pro-transaction, seeking whatever path works:

 

“I generally let them finish, but all the time I’m observing and trying to decide who is the real decision maker,” said Stephen S. Perlo, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group. “Sometimes I feel like a psychiatrist when I’m dealing with couples.”

 

Sometimes?  Try ‘most of the time.’ 

 

As human beings, we precariously balance between hyper-rational superego and foaming id (Nietzsche called it ape and superman), but when the stakes rise, and the issues more intimate, we over-pursue, we over-emote, and we benefit from the necessary rational interrupt:

 

In the course of probing for information, brokers sometimes encounter far more than they really want to know or need to know.  Details that might make a therapist wince, or at least write faster.

 

This makes the broker, like cartilage, the stressed-out shock absorber of people’s gut feelings:

 

“More so than any other profession, I think you get to see the window of people’s inner souls in a kind of hyper-reality superquick time,” said Rob Gross, a senior vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman. “Is it big enough to have kids, do I want to have kids, do I want to live in the city for the rest of my life? Do I want to move out to the suburbs? Should I move out? Real estate just opens up the kimono. And you see it all, beauty and warts.”

 

Who let the dogs out?!

 

Beyond their sheer entertainment value, the Times’s anecdotes do expose what people really care about:

 

“Public fighting is the worst,” said Diane Saatchi, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group East End in East Hampton. She described the frustrated wife, shopping for a $3 million summer home, who turned to her husband and uttered one line that said it all: “I wish you had a good job so we didn’t have to live like this.”

 

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

 

It’s a particularly sensitive topic for couples (the private mysteries of the two-person closed system):

 

Mercedes Menocal-Gregoire, an agent for Stribling & Associates, is surprised at what is sometimes revealed. “People get absolutely shameless in front of you,” she said. She recalled a well-known New York developer — she would not name him — whose idea of a pied-a-terre fell short of his wife’s. “In the middle of Park Avenue, she started screaming at the top of her lungs: ‘I can’t take it anymore. You never give me what I want.’ He says, ‘I give you whatever you want,’ and he bought her the apartment.”

 

What’s in your bulge?

 

Encounters with people we believe we will never see again bring out a curious absolution by irreproducibility, the sense (on which Las Vegas thrives) that we can say anything, do anything:

 

“People kind of tell you more about their needs because they have to fit the contents of a house,” she said. For example, one couple explained that they wanted a room with two queen beds because although they couldn’t fall asleep together, they needed somewhere to meet for sex.

 

It’s not just confidences that are revealed, but raw nerves:

 

Touch my bank account and I’ll shock you.

 

Even something as innocuous as an appliance can expose the tremors in a relationship. Dawn Ashinoff, a vice president of Bellmarc, recalled the mild-mannered wife who wondered aloud how to operate an apartment’s washing machine. “Her husband went ballistic,” she said. “He started screaming about how she never does the wash anyway and their clothes are always dirty. I finally calmed them down and recommended a good cleaning service.”

 

If only all of life’s little problems could be solved so easily.  And indeed, housing being so intimately tied up with family (it is, after all, where you sleep, and with whom), it signals much:

 

Usually, the subject of a dispute is secondary to its subtext. “It has nothing to do with the apartment,” Ms. Gregoire said. “It has to do with the nuance of the marriage.”

 

To an observant broker, those nuances are very much on display during the hunt for a house or an apartment. “The couples who have a great sex life are the ones who want the wall where their bed [bedroom, I think — Ed.] is to be away from the children’s rooms,” Ms. Gregoire said.

 

Housing is often the leading indicator of impending relationship change:

 

Sometimes it’s evident that one spouse is heading out, Ms. Gregoire said. “Then, you get a call from the husband: ‘I’m looking for a pied-a-terre for my mother.’ Really — your mother?”

 

‘Mother’, huh?

 

Money demonstrates commitment:

 

“If the husband is madly in love with his wife and financially capable, he will give her anything she wants, because a home is the basis of a happy relationship,” said A. Laurance Kaiser IV, the president of Key Ventures. “And he will buy it in both of their names.

 

“The man who has trepidation about whether the marriage will work tends to be more conservative. He wants a condo in his name, and if the marriage works out, he will transfer it to joint ownership.”

 

When I met Nancy, I was living in a rent-controlled apartment, to whose dustiness she took great and understandable exception, and after a couple of years of trying to vacuum away the infinity of dust, she demand, “You can afford it, why don’t you buy something?” to which I replied, quite happily, “If you find me something to buy, I’ll buy it.”  Whereupon the Careful Shopper went on many site visits, finding herself rejecting one after the other because she would never live there, and after one such visit she realized, “If I’m turning down every property for David because I wouldn’t live there, what does that say about my future life?” 

 

Sometimes, brokers hear about an important event in the couple’s lives at the same time as one of the spouses.

 

Mr. Lewis was showing a junior-four condo [A small two-bedroom with four rooms — Ed.] to a young couple when he happened to mention that a two-bedroom was available in the same building. The wife pressed to see it over her husband’s objections. “He was saying: ‘Why are you so adamant? We’ve already talked about a two-bedroom,’ ” Mr. Lewis recalled. “She just kept saying, ‘We need it.’ ”

 

Finally, she laid her hand on her belly, and the men slowly caught on.

 

Another little broker on the way?

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