And some from home owning as well!
Mark Brown
March 23, 2023
This is intended to be an addendum to my essay about how being a home owner has changed me. Instead of being released as one solid essay, I will be posting a couple specific lessons at a time so I can get into them a bit more. This is just the first 2 I have learned.
Lesson 1: Location really does matter.
I have watched way too much HGTV since I got house. I laugh a bit when I see people looking for houses on shows like “Property Brothers” and “Love It or List It” talk about not being willing to be outside 30 minutes from work or a specific location. The humor I see in that statement made over and over again by different people is how I really came to respect location as a main driver of decision making. I didn’t think I would care much about location when I began looking for a house in June of 2016. I knew I wanted to be relatively close to work so the drive in winter would be doable even on the days the weather sucked. That led me to specific areas, and even away from a house I was seriously considering on the south side of Des Moines. The latter was ultimately too far away to be the right call when I started to consider winter driving. It checked off quite a few of the boxes I was looking at, but it couldn’t overcome location. Ironically enough, I’d be much closer to my buddy I lift with. However, the house I did end up with on the east side of Des Moines really provided me with everything I needed and a location about 15 minutes away from work. I have appreciated the location of the house more than I anticipated.
Location also obviously impacts re-sale value. I have no intention on moving anytime soon but I do recognize that it has to be part of the decision making process. I have heard what my property has been assessed at and openly laughed, even if it isn’t a joke. It is genuinely amusing how different the assessment and purchase/sale price is. I took a second visit to a house originally built in the early 1900s because it had a lot of what I wanted. It was a mostly finished updated house but had some major elements , like a pea gravel driveway, I could improve on to increase re-sale value and a decently sized lot. Location got in the way of me pursuing the house in a meaningful way. Madrid is a small-ish town, and I would know what one of those looks like because I lived in one for a long time, and a bit isolated by my current standard. By the time I had gone to see the house, it had been on the market for 130 days or so. I’m reasonably sure the location of the house is what was holding it back.
There is also an element of reading the tea leaves to see what the future holds for the geographical area one is moving. Cities are always gobbling up country land to create taxable property. That is something to really think about. I remember a buddy talking about specific areas he wouldn’t think about moving because he projected what might be happening to it over the course of his lifetime. The future us always nebulous and nothing but a collection of what-if scenarios, The entire reason to buy a house or property is to get more value out of it over the long haul. One doesn’t need to be a real estate agent or investor to know looking into the future is necessary. One of the most famous examples of Michael Jordan’s Chicago estate. He built a home in an area that wasn’t highly desirable in the 1980s and didn’t develop into one. When he decided to sell that house in (year), he didn’t get anywhere near his asking price of $30 million. The words “Michael Jordan’s house” couldn’t overcome an undesirable location. Simple as that. Location matters. A lot.
Lesson 2: Can live with it. Can’t live with it.
This is how I will talk about the understood “you can’t get everything you want when house hunting, especially when on a budget” rule. I broke up features in a house I was looking at into those 2 columns, like they would be presented on a “pros vs cons” chart. The decision to put an offer on a specific house involves very specific life math, so to speak. In this way, each equation will be different. The math just isn’t the same house to house. Some elements will weight heavier on specific houses than others. What rates as a 8 on the 1-10 scale at one may rate a 6 on another, not always necessarily because the former is better or higher quality than the latter either. Home buying is a an inexact process. Some parts of it are logic and math while other parts of it openly defy both of them.
There is more that goes into “Can live with it” and “can’t live with it” than liking or disliking. Decision making involves doing one thing at the expense of another. Yes, the effects of one decision can dovetail beautifully into another but that is hardly inevitable. When looking into the elements any particular house and/or property has, the best question to ask is what can and can’t be lived with. I noticed in my travels to different houses for sale in June 2016 that certain traits popped up in certain areas and towns. It made me question what I couldn’t live without. I learned that basements weren’t automatically a thing in houses built in Bondurant, a city about 15 minutes north of my current home, because of the water table. Some areas of Des Moines don’t have garages or the garages are so small that they might as well be sheds. That’s not just specific parts of the city either. The house opposite me doesn’t have a garage. It looks like it was converted into an extra room at some point. I grew up in a house in Polk City that had a double car garage and a basement. Coming to the realization I might have to choose between a basement and a garage challenged me to think of concessions I’d have to make in order to make a decision one way or another. What’s amusing now is how much I treat my garage like a shed despite the fact that I could easily park my car in there. I don’t even park there even in the dead of winter. Just shows how values change situationally. Getting a car that featured remote start right at the start of 2021 had a lot do with it.
Being able to live with something doesn’t mean that I like it. All it means is that something is not ideal or perfect but I can work around it. Life would be great if everything about something that costs so much money would be perfectly spot on, but we all know that it doesn’t work that way. Often times any thing’s, place’s or person’s best asset is their greatest weakness. As long as the overall structure is healthy and in tact, work can be done slowly to make it better over time. That is about as good as it gets when owning a home. Having to multiple home projects at once is the bane of any homeowner’s sanity. It’s super easy to lose track of costs when juggling multiple projects. This is especially true when the monetary situation is quite fluid. Those HGTV renovation shows I referenced really do make light of the reality of home improvement costs and what a monetary commitment it is. I would hesitate to say that shows that like that lie about the difficulty of making home improvements because that would be a charge that requires proof. Those shows really don’t help get a proper image of the home owning experience. They are good inspiration art galleries though.
Plus, what goes into the “can live with” part of the chart can be somewhat shocking given all things that can be considered. I put an offer down on a house in Altoona, a highly desirable city that I live within 2 to 5 minutes of, that featured a galley kitchen and a bedroom that someone in the family definitely smoked a lot of cigarettes in over the years. It was a good house in all other ways. Location was great, price was decent and the other living spaces was up to par. I know that smoking room would be a hard project to overcome so it’s probably good I didn’t get it. I was told at the time that getting that odor out of the room would be next to impossible. I know now there are paints designed to help eliminate them. That room was a major project by itself. However, the fact that I could put an offer on that house at all given how much I like cooking and hate the smell of cigarettes shows how easily not liking specific aspects of an asset can be overcome. I can’t overstate how much I hate cigarette smoke. It truly is one of the most awful odors there is in the world. If I could eliminate it from this Earth, I would do it right now. Buying a house will definitely challenge anyone’s “can’t live with” list.
Life Through Lifting 