Off the Market

Well, that didn't work out as well as we had hoped.

The ambiguous "that" in the previous sentence refers to home ownership, specifically our purchase of "HIGHLY DESIRABLE WESTON LINE/BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY LOCALE! SPARKLING SUNFILLED 2003 RENOVATED condominium featuring large newer E-I-K, bright sundrenched living room, gleaming hardwood floors throughout, new natural gas heating system, relaxing lower level family room/office/playroom, spacious private deck, ample storage, separate laundry, three car parking, and more!" a/k/a 34 Turner St a/k/a Home.

In truth, I'm indulging in a bit of hyperbole here. Homeownership has generally been enjoyable, and how can I disparage my current environs? Natalia and I crossed the threshold as (pretty much) newlyweds, and what was a makeshift study in 2005 now contains an occupied crib, an occupied toddler bed, and enough toys to fill an ark. This is home.

Buying a house begins as a financial transaction; a slow haggle towards a fair market price, followed almost immediately by the mild queasiness of buyers' remorse. "Was this a good investment?" you wonder. "I hope the water pressure is as good as I remember it the two times we visited." Around here, prices are all ridiculously inflated but they tend to hold steady. (I've long since come to terms with the fact that 3 bedroom/2 bathroom houses with land in NC and NJ sell for less than what we paid for our condo.) So while communities in Arizona and Florida and Nevada experiences titanic boom and bust cycles, our investment has been spared that trauma--though enough air has been let out of the balloon to make us feel deflated.

And it's not that we don't love our place. To the contrary; we get on with our neighbors, our street is quiet on weekends, and it's tough to beat our commute (about 20 minutes for Natalia and I--combined). It's just grown a bit too small for the size and number of our kids, and with public school looming (a godsend, really, considering the price of daycare), we would like to pick up our nest and drop it somewhere in Newton.

That is the plan, anyway. Reality is proving a harder realm to navigate.

We put our house on the market back in June, had a few open houses, private showings, and then waited...and waited...and waited for an offer to come in. None did. Whatever optimism we had in the spring had expired by Thanksgiving, and a few weeks later I told our realtor to take the place off the market for the winter. The thought of having to maintain a spotless home (with two kids...in the winter!) for a handful of showings and no credible offers was too depressing.

So now...we wait a bit, and then try again in the spring. We'll certainly be motivated sellers, and hopefully if we enter the market earlier than we did last time, then we can move the place--and ourselves--in time for the new school year.

In truth this whole process is disheartening. I know I shouldn't complain--we are lucky, all things considered, and our problem is a trivial one when compared with the travails of many other working families whose finances have been bombed out by even worse mortgages, or medical bills, or fraud, or anything else that you see as the lead story on NBC Nightly News.

But back in the halcyon days of a Republican president and war with two middle eastern countries, buying property seemed like a can't-miss proposition. Mortgages were easy to get. And everyone was getting them. (This proliferation of 0% down, ARM-heavy, just-sign-here-and-we'll-worry-about-payments-later notes also benefited us, by the way.) So we blithely rolled with the first-time home-buyer tide, getting pre-approved for an amount that seemed high (but who wasn't?), and then bought at a price reasonably below our approval number.

At that time, if anybody was saying that home prices would not remain steady, they were nowhere to be found. And hardly anyone was saying that home prices would actually fall through the floor--that was heresy. Conventional wisdom said that our best move would be to purchase a "starter home" (34 Turner, for us) and then, in 5-10 years, when the size of the family had grown and more space was needed, we could flip our place--selling at a higher price than what we had bought for, parlaying that gain into the home we always wanted. This idea was an integral part of most conversations I had with mortgage lenders at the time. "Why worry about 5-year ARMs? You'll be out of your place by that point," they would say. The American Dream, remixed for 2005.

Well hindsight is 20/20 and, it turns out, is also a cold shower on hot expectations. Here we are, nearly 7 years into our adventure in home ownership. If we sell at market price we sustain a significant loss; we can't put that towards our dream home, whether it be in Newton or Norton or Northampton. And we can't really ride out the recession here either. The kids are getting too big for their room, and both Natalia and I want to open more doors for them. Schools and space are at a premium and we can't get either of those by staying here.

So the current plan is to look for rental properties in Newton, and then hope and pray and scheme and claw that we can sell Waltham without too much of a loss. Yes, "too much"--I've given up hope that we will recoup what we have put into this place, and am prepared to lose money if we sell. (Though I still hold out a shred of hope that some rich Israeli whose son/daughter will be a freshman at Brandeis next year will offer me what I paid in 2005...that would be a dream come true!)

It's been a good ride here, even if the exit will be bumpy. Market value gain is only one measure of a property; we have managed to make this place home, and whenever we do turn out the lights and lock the door behind us, it will be a sad day. We've invested a lot of money here. But it's had a good return on investment, as I look around at two overstuffed kids' chairs (one pink, one green), trucks galore, and a pair of discarded toddler pants littering the living room floor. We will clean up here and drop our belongings somewhere else. Market be damned. Our ledger may not feature the numbers that I had hoped for when we signed the papers all those years ago, but I've been blessed with much richness here. I miss this place already.