You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Real Estate Edition

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” — Norman Vincent Peale

It’s a nice thought. In our case, though, we shot for the moon, bidding on a house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and when we missed, we landed on our asses, busted & bruised.

In all happened over the course of one week. First, while idly checking Zillow last Saturday evening, I saw that a 3-bedroom house had hit the market. Not only was the house nicely renovated and spacious and on a seriously cute cul-de-sac equidistant from the subway and the park, at $880K, it was affordable! I mean, you know, relatively! (For reference, there are literally zero 3-bedroom apartments available in my general vicinity for less than $1 million.)

The very first open house was scheduled for the next day, and since Ben’s mom was in town, we wouldn’t even have to take Babygirl with us. Quite pleased with this turn of events, Ben and I headed off to Bay Ridge. First we saw another cheaper house which was so dilapidated that its best feature was a tree in the backyard being held up by a stilt. Then we saw our house. There was a piano in the parlor. Fuck, there was a PARLOR. There was a huge family room / basement too, and a patio, and there were Pueblo storyteller dolls around like my dad collected.

Even leaving aside the house with the tired tree, I’ve seen my fair share of Wrong, in this search and in previous ones. I know the feeling of houses where the owners’ priorities in no way overlap with my own, where they have added flatscreen TVs to the bathrooms and turned what would have been full-sized basements into elaborate, temperature-controlled wine cellars.

Here, we agreed with every choice the owners had made, down to the selection of their vintage, dark-wood dining room table. It was a whole house full of Right.

So, okay. Obviously we needed to bid on the house, even though we were unprepared to do any such thing. We hadn’t gotten pre-approval from a lender. We hadn’t begun the process of selling our current place. In fact, we hadn’t even agreed we ought to sell our current place, which we love; the real estate search was still in the exploratory, fact-finding stage.

When you’re looking at places in NYC, though, shit gets real fast. Families moved through that open house around us with the glint of purpose in their eyes. After talking to the real estate brokers, they told us to write down our info with an asterisk by our names — but ours was not the only star. We knew we had to get pre-approved, fast, and that we’d have to then submit an offer that would encourage them take us seriously.

Our current lenders agreed to give us a mortgage — contingent, of course, on our selling our apartment. And there’s the rub. Nobody wants a contingent offer, the brokers told us. Nobody wants a contingent offer, our real estate lawyer from last time agreed. She segued right into New York-style problem solving mode: “Are there any family members you can borrow money from?”

That’s the wall we were backed up against. Someone out there, we knew, was going to have close to a million dollars either in cash or in financing from a bank without any contingency. We had to compete with those people. But we didn’t want to borrow money from family. We bought our current place, this place, by ourselves; we saved the down payment, we paid off loans, we got the mortgage. We were absolutely privileged to be able to do so, privileged and fortunate and grateful. And now we wanted to upgrade on our own steam, too.

Besides, if we had the kind of family members from whom we could casually borrow one or two hundred thousand dollars, we would be in very different circumstances. We would probably even be very different people.

Even though we really, really wanted the house, we decided to do the best we could on our own: to submit our contingent pre-approval with an offer of $10K over the asking price. Our intent was to communicate to the sellers, If you’re willing to wait the extra bit of time it will take us to sell, and it won’t take long, we’ll give you everything you want and more.

I told friends that I was setting myself up for either Depression, if we weren’t accepted, or Anxiety, if we were.

On Sunday, we found out it was to be Depression. The sellers accepted someone else’s non-contingent offer. Their house was on the market for one whole week.

Being rejected can send a person ricocheting in one of two directions: it can make one more determined (“I’ll show you!”) or it can make one meek, even despairing (“I shouldn’t have tried”). For one soggy evening, I curled up into myself, questioning all of our financial decisions, from staying in New York, to DWYL-ing, to having another child. Who did we think we were? Were we foolishly trying to Have It All?

My best friend called, entirely by coincidence. (Or maybe, after 30 years of knowing each other, there are no coincidences.) We’d been out of touch for a week; I hadn’t even told her we were looking at a place we liked, let alone that we had bid for it. “This happens to everyone,” she said. “Falling in love and getting your heart broken. This is part of the process.”

It hadn’t been, though, with this apartment, our current place. We found it, it was perfect, we bid for it, we got it. We were lucky, is the short version. We were lucky and it was right. Maybe, despite the various ways in which this house seemed right, it wasn’t. Not for us, anyway. Not now.

In the moment, it was easier to believe that the universe was slapping us down for wanting too much.

Ben tried to say things to me, too; I couldn’t hear him. I finally got to sleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night and spend another soggy hour going through all the same thoughts again.

The next day, I got up, drank some water, and started researching clever ways to make a small second bedroom fit both a toddler and a baby. The real estate search is officially suspended. We might never be able to afford a three-bedroom place within an hour’s commute of Ben’s work, not with both of us prioritizing professional fulfillment over paychecks. But we can almost certainly manage a loft bed and a mini crib.

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