People Magazine doesn’t just present the sexiest actors alive. They’re also in the inspiration business. A few months ago they inspired their readers with a story about a family who bought their childhood home back. But it was the article they ran this week about a couple who bought a house sight-unseen that hammers the point home even more effectively: We have less control over our homebuying decisions than we think.
This quote really caught my attention:
The 2,500-square-foot house has four bedrooms and three bathrooms, but what stood out most to Molly was how much it resembled her childhood home.
“What immediately struck us were the cozy sunroom and the koi pond in the backyard — it reminded me so much of the home I grew up in,” she explains.
“My dad spent years creating a backyard oasis with a pond where we spent many evenings as a family. This house felt like a mirror of that experience.”
Purchases made for these reasons are not an anomaly, however. We create, or at least try to recreate, our happy childhoods. Yet it goes beyond an old heirloom, or family reunion photo, or piece of art that our family passed down to us. Memorabilia does not scratch the same itch. It is instead through small moments and the tiniest details through which those periods of our lives are imagined and reconstituted: the light coming through a window, a design element, attached to an intangible joy that we must, to paraphrase J.L. Carr, snatch as it flies.
I lay this out as if anyone could identify in advance what triggers these warm feelings from childhood, as if our memories play in our minds in sepia like a film flashback. Sadly, it doesn’t usually work this way. In truth, most of us only recognize these recreations after they’ve already happened. For instance, my wife and I had two sets of French doors as part of an apartment renovation design, which created an interior dining room in the center of the apartment. Months later, I was staring at the French doors in my mother’s house, dumbstruck that I had, in effect, simply moved her dining room into my home.
In my book I tell another story of a couple who had a similarly shocking experience. Only upon visiting the wife’s childhood apartment in Midwood, Brooklyn years after they bought an apartment in Manhattan did they discover both elevator vestibule tile floors had the exact same pattern and colors. These are subconscious happy memories, lurking in the background, that manifest in our homebuying decisions.
Leaving Home by Intention, Drawn Back by Memories
I has a piece published this week in the Jewish Journal about Sukkot, a holiday during which people leave their homes, and through the leaving that they appreciate the homes they get to go back to. But we’re talking about a different time scale when it comes to leaving our childhood homes. By the time we start looking to buy our first property or the next, we’ve been gone from that original nest for some period of years.
Sukkot demonstrates an intentional leaving from our comfortable confines, just as the search for a new home is an intentional move out of our current comfort zone. When it comes to homebuying, however, I hope you can see that free will sort of goes out the door from there. What do I mean? When we see the lengths to which we go to uncover new versions of the homes of our youth, we must consider just how little choice we have in deciding what will make us happy. We can’t control the paint colors or finishes that make us smile, any more than the woman in the article above had over the design elements her father installed in her childhood backyard so long ago.
Does it matter whether or not you have free will over your homebuying preferences? I recommend that you not think too hard about it. Just take what you learn, and run with it. If you can get out of your head and stop overthinking your checklist, you’ll be way ahead of the game.
How do you stay out of your head, though? That’s where real estate agents come in. While most folks believe that agents only inhabit the realm of dealmaking, there is much more to it. Agents empower you to discover what home means for yourself, to go below the surface to those hidden preferences. Because what’s important is that you find a home that gives you what you really need. We all just want to come home, but we don’t often know what we’re looking for until we see it. Great agents make room for this fuzzy vision to come to life.
Bring Us Home
Meanwhile in Israel, the remaining living hostages were returned home this week from Gaza, along with bodies of those who dies while in captivity. Many had been dragged out of their homes on a Saturday morning as they drank their coffee—very much not by choice—then tortured and starved in tunnels for 738 days. An entire country exhaled on Monday, October 13th, a day which will be commemorated, and should be considered a homecoming by any definition.
The daily chants and the banners hoisted and posted everywhere across Israel bore three words: Bring Them Home Now. This tight-knit nation proved yet again, for all of us, that the home we desire extends beyond our childhoods, even beyond our lifetimes. We yearn for a homeland, too. The idea of an oasis, a refuge, a haven on a far grander scale lives in each of us, with borders that only end at the limits of our imagination.
The irony was not lost on me that the hostage deal was negotiated by three real estate people: Witkoff, Kushner, and Trump. Comedian Sam Morril has already made a bit that hit a little too close to home: that real estate agents will negotiate with anyone, that perhaps agents are terrorists themselves. And that’s why Hamas caved in.
Middle East peace deal? That could be something, right? That’s good. You see Jared Kushner. He basically helped orchestrate this whole thing. He said, “Yeah, it’s like, you know, because he’s a realtor. That’s what he said. He’s like ‘Realtors get shit done.’
It is funny. It’s like in every movie it’s like ‘We will not negotiate with terrorists.’ You know who will? Realtors. Because I think even Hamas looks at Realtors like, ‘These terrorist, piece of shit, horrible human beings.’
Jared Kushner’s talking. He’s like, ‘Look. There’s another family that’s dying to make this peace deal. So…I would get on it.’
I might have a better—if not at least less crass—explanation. Good agents believe that everyone deserves a home they love. Non-judgement is as good a starting place as any, especially in high-stakes negotiations. It may be why the former hostages are spending this weekend with their loved ones instead of in tunnels.
Maya Angelou wrote, “You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it’s all right.” I think what she meant is that so much of our lives have been shaped by those formative years in ways we can’t begin to comprehend. At the same time, home is where you get to be some ever-evolving version of yourself where you feel the most free, the most alive, the most supported and safe. And it doesn’t get any better than that, even if what home means to you is out of your control.
Scott Harris is a veteran real estate agent and the founder of boutique New York City real estate firm Magnetic, and the author of new book The Pursuit of Home: A Real Estate Guide to Achieving the American Dream (Matt Holt Books), available now. Pick up your own copy today!
