The Savvy Synopsis

If you welcome friends or family alongside you in the homebuying process, you are bound to get some opinions. But is it helpful or harmful to open up to this form of “advice” when making such a big decision?

As you plan to buy or sell your home, you will likely hear some thoughts and opinions from several different sources. Your parents, your kids, you friends, and just about anyone you meet will give you their two cents when it comes to your homebuying decisions. But is it actually helpful in making your selection? Or does it cause more stress?

Maybe you are considering moving, but your kids aren’t thrilled about the idea. Whether it’s because they are too young to understand or are overlooking the benefits ahead of them, kids are not the best source for a second opinion. Then again, your kids will live in the new home, too. So how much say should they get? 

On the other end, parents of homebuyers are often eager to help. Perhaps they have gone through the homebuying process several times before and just want to help their (adult) children get the best-case scenario. In many cases, this can prove to be very helpful for first-time homebuyers. But, be careful to not let parents get too involved or become the primary decision-maker. At the end of the day, who is the homeowner? You!

Listen to the full episode to hear more about the opinions you may get or go to the timestamps below to hear a particular segment.

0:18 - You’re going to hear a lot of opinions about what you should do when buying a home. How do you weigh out these opinions?

1:00 - When have kids carried stronger opinions than the homebuyers? How involved should kids be?

3:25 - Open communication with your children might open up the possibilities of what will best suit your family.

5:17 - How have parents of the homebuyers gotten in the way? Or are they helpful?

8:45 - Look for help, but do not let someone else make the decision.

10:31 - It may be worth spending the money on a professional for opinions on a home.

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Show Transcription:

Note: This is an automated transcription. Please forgive the robots as they tend to make some (a lot of) mistakes...

It's time for the savvy real tour podcast. I'm Walter Storholt alongside Angie Cole, the owner and broker in charge of a Cole Realty serving you throughout the triangle, teaching you about the ins and outs when it comes to buying or selling a home. On today's show of the savvy realtor, we're going to talk about everyone's opinions. When you're buying or selling a home, you're going to hear a lot of different [inaudible]

opinions about what you should do. Parents, your agent, even your kids are going to weigh in on how you should price your home, what the backyard should look like, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So Angie is an agent. I'm hoping you'll give us some examples here about how you've seen opinions and others derail the process and what you had to do it again and get things back on the right track. But also when it has been a, it's not all negative when it's been a positive thing to have the buyer or seller get some outside guidance or references and those kinds of things. So to make it easy, we'll break it down into the different people who are providing opinions and we'll start it off with a fun one. For families out there with kids, kids are probably not going to be shy about sharing their opinion on what they want. Have you seen instances of when kids carried more weight than they should have and when is it a good idea to listen to what the kids want out of out of the home versus the people who are paying for it? The parents.

So I mean it's kind of sad and I don't mean to laugh about it, but I've seen where a mom has pretty much had an emotional breakdown because her kids were upset about me leaving and it was so, I mean it was kind of bothersome that this mom who you know was one of the financial deciders in regards to, you know, making a move and selling their home was so upset because her children who under the age of 10 were not wanting to make this move. And I just feel like kids should not be that involved in a transition. You know, you are the parent, you should make the decisions, but you know, we should be able to also spin it to make it exciting for them as well. Tell them about the new things in this new area. In this instance, they were actually moving to be closer to their family.

So Hey, you're now going to see your grandparents a lot more. You'll see your cousins, you know, whoever's live in there. So what can we do to make this experience more exciting? I know whenever I was moving, my daughter was young, she freaked out. She was little. She was, I think around three freaked out because she thought with moving her toys would have to stay behind in our old home. And so once I got to the bottom of why she was upset that we were moving, you know, everything was fine. I explained, Oh no, your toys are coming too, you know? Um, so be careful of letting kids really weigh in on whether it's selling or buying a home. You know, on the flip side though, we can really make the kids a part of the purchase. So whenever you're buying a home, don't allow the kid to pick the floor, plan the home, but allow them to pick the room color, make it exciting for them as well. But they should not be the deciding factor when it comes to buying or selling a home. Right.

I think that's great advice. And especially as they get older, you can give them maybe even more responsibility. So, uh, I know like my parents let me pick which rooms. So they were kinda two that were sort of equal rooms, what side of the house do you want to be in? They kind of let me pick which [inaudible]

maybe if you're the, you know, elder child as well, you get to pick the room first and then you know, the next child can. So yeah.

And they took me along on viewing appointments, which I found very educational and very cool. And it was neat to be plugged in part of the process. I know not all kids may find that exciting, but I, I thought that was pretty neat. The other thing is, and this what to me would be, again, I'm just drawing on my own personal experiences here, but maybe you can I identify with this, and this is kind of from that positive perspective. I grew up in Greensboro and my parents were wanting to move to the beach, to the coast and they were just assuming kind of for a while that, well once Walter goes to college, we'll go ahead and do that. And I told him, Hey, let's go now. And that really did influence them to spark them to say, okay, well maybe we don't have to wait. I was gung ho about it and that made them more comfortable about, well let's go ahead and pull the trigger. And it was a fantastic move. I love going down there. And so there's ways to take that influence and at least confirm what you were already thinking or

that is true because I, I actually speak with a lot of parents who are in that same scenario where they say, you know what? We want to eventually make a move. We want to eventually downsize, but we need to wait until our last child gets out of high school and goes off to college. So by having that open communication with your children, yeah. You know what your child might be on board. I know growing up if my, you know, parents said, Hey, we're thinking about moving to the beach, I'd be like, okay, let's go now. Yeah. But you know, sometimes definitely kids can have their own opinions and a move might not be exciting for them. Maybe they have a lot of friends in the neighborhood, but it all does boil down to the parents should be the ones deciding the move. I feel like

there are times when it's good to listen in to what the kids are weighing in with. Um, but sure. Probably. But don't let them control them.

Don't let them control the process. And you know, I, I felt really bad for this one client who, I mean, she was just so upset throughout the process. And the only reason why is because her kids were upset, you know, and it now they're happy of course, but it just, it was, you know, sad to see her just really having a tough time with this move. And it was all because of the kids. Yup.

It's a tough situation. It can be, but there's right ways to handle it. No doubt about it. All right. Well what about the other generation that might be in the equation? So we're the home buyers are the home sellers. We've been listening to our kids, but now what about the parents? This one I guess, could easily be viewed as going both way. Surely there are times where you're going to rely on advice from your parents, but there are other times, I'm sure you've seen where parents may be get in the way of the transaction coming to fruition

for sure. And I think having the parent involvement is great when it's a first time buyer, right? Because most of the time, first time buyers are absolutely clueless about the process. So by having your parents give some guidance and to help you better understand the process. I think that's great. It's great to just kind of go back and forth, you know, be able to call your mom and your dad and say, Hey, I saw this home in this area. What do you think? Or this situation just happened. Should I be concerned? So it's great to have your parents involved because they more than likely have been through this process of buying or selling a home. Probably more than once. But be careful to not allow your parents to get too involved. For example, you hear of those weddings where it's pretty much the parents sweating and not, you know that the child who's getting married because the parents are just running the show.

You know, I've seen that same situation with someone buying a home. We've actually, we've had a sale recently where I was representing the seller and the buyer had been under contract with us for about three weeks. All of the sudden the parents of the buyer came to view the home with the buyer and then the buyer terminated. The parents decided that, you know, for this, this and this reason, you should not buy this home. So, you know, I feel like it's one of those scenarios and situations where you should allow your child to really take the reigns. If they are the ones spending the money they should put on their big boy and big girl pants and they should be the ones who make the decisions. It's okay to help them and guide them, but don't be the decision maker for them.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's good advice and guidance in that situation to keep in mind when you're the parents trying to give advice or when you're the, you know, the son or daughter trying to determine what advice is good to, you know, act on and what's not and that kind of thing. My thing that I think about is, you know, parents always want everything to be perfect and when they went through the home buying process on their own, they were probably okay to compromise and meet halfway and those kinds of things. But then when it's the child going through the process, if everything's not perfect and it's wrong, right. Just like everything else that you, that your child goes through, you don't want it to be that way. You want everything to be just right. And so you have to kind of divorce yourself from that mindset a little bit.

I 100% agree with that. I've seen situations where it's made it really tough for our buyer specialist to be the resource, be the one giving guidance because the parents keep stepping in and say, Oh, this isn't normal. This isn't right. Well you know what, it is normal. This is the normal process. And unfortunately we wish it could be easy peasy from start to finish, but sometimes we run into hiccups out of our control. Maybe there was a little termite issue. Maybe there is high levels of radon, but it's our job as real estate agents to guide our client who, you know, is the child through this process. And having the parents always chiming in sometimes can really, you know, mess up a deal when the transaction was completely fine. The homeless is fine, but you're right. A lot of times parents want everything to be perfect for their child. You know? And, and it's, it's not perfect.

Yeah. [inaudible] keeps things in perspective that's really important except all of this advice and these opinions. But then put it in perspective and pass it through your own filter. I think that's helpful.

I want to bring up a great example actually and S speaking about you. Um, you know, you told me how recently you are redoing one of your bathrooms and your dad is helping you, your parents are helping you. And a situation like that is amazing to have your parents there to give the guidance. Maybe they're more advanced or you know, they understand the construction process a little bit more when it comes to renovating. So allowing them to step in and help out with that sort of thing I think is wonderful. But when it came to buying your home, I mean you were the decision maker, right? You know, you and your wife. So it's great to have your, your parents input for help on things like in your case. But if you're the one buying the home, you should be the one who's deciding.

Yeah. And we actually did go through a situation similar to kind of what we've been talking about where there was a foundation crack and he made it into a huge deal. And we went as far as to say, I wouldn't buy the house if I were you. And so it wasn't a big issue. It just, that created obviously a big hurdle to then, you know, jump across, you know, and that had to be a situation where I talked to the real estate agent at the time and he was like, look, you're, if we were in a different neighborhood or a different part of the state, this could be an issue if you were seeing a crack like this. But with where you are, it's very normal for these neighborhoods. There's a ton of settling every day. You're not going to go view a home that doesn't have some sort of, you know, hairline crack the soil.

Exactly. Area like, so this is, you're not leveling things on the right playing field. He's down at the beach and it's, you know, so he's drawing on that experience and it's different. And so we decided to still go through with the home purchase and that had to be a time where I had to say, thanks for your advice dad, but I'm going to make my own choice and fall into a sink hole. No, I'm just kidding. And the house has been fine. The crack is not expanded, right. In the five years we've been there, it's been okay, but we did take the step of having a structural engineer come out and doing a deeper analysis and perspective

the thing, and you probably got that advice from your father to maybe let's spend a couple extra hundred dollars just to make sure, get the reassurance, which I think is a good thing. Yep,

absolutely. So good example of how you can kind of weigh all those different things. If you need help weighing these types of things and you don't have an agent who's helping you kind of filter through all these different opinions that you're getting, I'll encourage you to reach out to Angie Cole. You can see how she kind of view things, what her perspective is on being able to walk you through any troubles that you might encounter or analyzing all of these different opinions that are being thrown around. Shoot Angie a text or give her a call. 919-5386TY-47TY-7 is the number to get in touch. Again, that's (919) 538-6477 you can I ask her about buying a home here in the area? Maybe it's a question about selling. That's just a great way to get in touch. You can call her right now at 919-5386TY-47TY-7 or shoot a text and she'll be able to go back and forth with you about whatever you're thinking about in terms of your housing issue that you're maybe facing.

(919) 538-6477 is that number to reach? Angie Cole, your savvy realtor here in the triangle? Nine one nine five three 64 77 you've been listening to the savvy real tour podcast. I'm Walter store Holt's alongside Angie Cole. She's the owner and broker in charge of A Cole Realty here in the triangle. And if you have questions for Angie, we invite you to go online to a Cole realty.com listen to past podcast episodes on the website, read the blog and all the great information, including the option to find a home right there on the website. That's a Cole realty.com and you can also call Angie with your questions. (919) 578-3128

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