We’re six weeks in and most of the boxes are out of the living room. The picture frames are still leaning up against the walls, though, because although we are definitely going to paint the room green, or just possibly blue, all the patches we’ve daubed on the chimney breast so far look like toothpaste.
Thankfully, that issue might resolve itself. Every time my wife thinks of a new job to do on the house, we write it down on a Post-it note and stick it on the wall: fix skirting boards, slap! Buy kitchen table, slap! At this rate, the little yellow squares will wallpaper both reception rooms before Christmas.
The problem with our house — with any house, I guess — is that the closer you look, the more things wrong with it you see. It’s demoralising.
It certainly felt a lot more dramatic when we bought the place. Back in June the mortgage market was in turmoil, but we managed to submit our application just before our lender pulled its products and repriced them. At first, we felt like Indiana Jones, rolling under the closing door then reaching back to grab our hat. Now, with five-year fixed rate mortgage rates stuck a little under 6 per cent and house prices falling at their fastest rate in 14 years, it’s starting to feel like we were Jack Dawson, leaping from the jetty to board the departing Titanic.
That reminds me: unblock sink, slap!
So it dawned on me — do I have homebuyer’s remorse?
Post-purchase dissonance is believed to arise from having two psychologically inconsistent thoughts at the same time: I thought this thing would make me happy, but I’m not. It can elicit feelings of shame, guilt, even the idea that you’ve been duped by the seller or salesperson. A study from 2000 described a 22-item scale for measuring buyer’s remorse, including “I wonder if I have made the right choice?”, which applies to me, and “I was in agony after I bought it”, which doesn’t — although, if I have to assemble one more piece of flat-pack furniture, I genuinely might crack.
Fix the crack in the ceiling, slap!
At clinical psychologist Dr Stephen Blumenthal’s practice in central London, he sees lots of people — many of them very successful in business — who have experienced buyer’s remorse. It’s all the fault of a competitive mindset, he says. “It’s part of the illusion that goods or things will improve our happiness. The hedonic hit of having the thing we have aspired to [own] only lasts a short period of time, before the anxiety kicks in that you are out of pocket.”
Just how much you could be out of pocket is the daunting bit. A report by Aviva from July 2021 found that half of UK homeowners who bought since the start of the pandemic felt they had overpaid — and that’s at a time when the Bank of England base rate was 0.1 per cent. Now at 5.25 per cent, and with financial markets expecting interest rates to stay higher for longer — with the first cut in the base rate not anticipated until mid-2024 — what on earth must buyers be thinking now?
“We’ve seen a massive slowdown in the market, but only shallow falls in price,” says Richard Donnell, head of research at the property website Zoopla. He thinks we’re in line for several years of very low house-price growth. Only when real incomes start rising again does he expect the market to pick up in any meaningful way.
Personally, I’ve detected a marginal increase in homes coming to the market near me. I know this because I’m still signed up to get notifications when homes come up for sale in my area. They ping on my phone from time to time.
My wife’s jaw dropped when she discovered this. “Why?!” she asked. “Staying subscribed to property alerts is like staying on dating apps after you’ve got married.”
I was going to joke that I’m still on them, too — but I thought better of it.
“No, you’ve got to get off Rightmove,” says Roarie Scarisbrick, a buying agent at Property Vision. But otherwise, I shouldn’t beat myself up about it. “On any given day even the experts who write about [the market] don’t know what’s going to happen three months or six months down the line,” he says. “And if you do find yourself in the position where the market has tanked . . . so long as you can afford the mortgage, what can you do? You’ve got a roof over your head; you’ve just got to live under it.”
I should feel grateful, of course. I realise that for those Londoners stuck in the ever-worsening rental crisis my situation must elicit schadenfreude at its most delicious.
Blumenthal says it doesn’t matter if you think you’ve got a good deal (which, I do, really) or a bad one, it can still leave you feeling guilty, bereft and lonely. And if you do feel that way? “Once you’ve invested in your basic material security, invest in your relationships,” he says. “It’s good relationships that are the antidote to loneliness.”
He’s right, of course. Our toddler was rapidly outgrowing the flat we used to live in. And as expensive as the new house is, I think he loves it: the space and the little garden.
Last weekend, in a fit of affection for the new place, I tried to notch his height into the kitchen doorframe for the first time.
I stepped back and smiled and thought: the door jamb is coming away from the wall at the bottom there.
Call handyman, slap!
Nathan Brooker is the editor of House & Home
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