More house hunters taking hiatus

We think of real estate transactions as things that are executed by a doer -- whether buyer or seller. But it's actually a two-way street. The Sunday Do-It-Yourself Open House hunting; the vigilant tidying to be ever-ready for showings; the mental and verbal processing of all of those houses -- all of these actions that go into real estate deals are not just impacted by, but have impacts on, the buyer or seller doing the deal.

As house hunts grow longer, I've noticed a trend of buyers-in-progress consciously and intentionally giving themselves a brief time-out from the process, usually taking off anywhere from a weekend to two weeks. One client flew to Barcelona, Spain, for some respite after a particularly frenzied series of bidding wars. Another took a week to mourn her recently departed father, and, in the process, had some insights about what he would want her to think and feel about the place she eventually bought. Several have just downshifted a bit for a few weeks, giving up their standing weekend appointments for weekday-evening single-house showings for a couple of weeks so they could actually visit relatives or take day trips they'd been putting off.

Some buyers are just looking for a break from the grind of seeing house after house, devoting all their spare time and energy to visiting other people's houses and devotedly, repeatedly envisioning whether they could live there. Others perceive (or, perhaps, ahem, have been told by their agents) that their past strategy has been flawed, and they take a hiatus to assess and reformulate their plans for how they will proceed differently going forward.

In fact, I have seen a number of different motivations and uses for a house-hunting hiatus, and many buyers combine several or even all of the following in their reasons for taking a break:

1. Rest. This is the siesta-style hiatus, intended to recharge the mental and energetic batteries. House hunting is hard work, and emotionally draining as well -- especially in a market where multiple offers and buyer competition mean that a buyer might write offers on many properties over many months before getting one. The emotional rollercoaster is obvious: You don't want to get your hopes up until your offer is accepted, which could be weeks if you're making offers on bank-owned or short-sale listings, but you don't want to even write an offer on a place if you're not excited about the prospect of owning and living in it.

This is exhausting, so some buyers just take some downtime for rest alone before they get back to it. A true hiatus of this type also involves self-enforced respite from the online house hunt, that always-on and (thus) potentially most draining element of the new-generation homebuying process. (But these buyers never totally shut off -- they live with the hope in the back of their mind that their agent will e-mail or call to interrupt the hiatus with the jubilant news that they've located "the one." It happens -- ask my Spanish siesta client.)

2. Review. Almost every break-taking homebuyer does this, instinctively. Many of my clients save every property flier and, during hiatus, go back over what they've seen, what they liked and what they didn't like. Buyers struggling to wrap their heads around what they actually need to offer to be the successful buyer of a particular property in their particular area might ask their broker or agent to brief them on the final sale prices of properties they were outbid on, if sufficient time has passed for that data to be public record. ...CONTINUED

All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, in part or in whole, without written permission of Inman News. Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright law.