You know you’re getting older when you start sentences off with “I’m going to date myself with this story…”. Well, here goes anyway. When we got our first listing way back in 2005 (while I was still in college), I had this idea that buyers should be able to sleep over at a house they were strongly considering writing an offer on. Think about it. The average showing is thirty minutes or less, some lasting as little as fifteen minutes. Do you really know if a house is *the one* in under an hour? So let’s say you schedule a second date. Same deal. And then, if all the boxes are checked, you write an offer and live happily ever after. OR, you move in and quickly realize that X,Y and Z were not at all how you remembered them being. Mostly because if the seller played their cards right and put lipstick on the pig, you had a huge surge of dopamine ooohing and ahhhing over all of their fancy furnishings.

Back to the sleepover. Let’s say you had a chance to spend the night Bachelor style and decide in the morning if the house would get the final rose. You could walk to the cute little park around the corner, gauge just how far the nearest grocery store was as you schlepped your reusable bags back to the house, wake to the jarring noise of the rickety air conditioner, see the water seeping in the basement, and actually feel how cramped the kitchen might be for your family of five as you tried to whip up breakfast, pre-coffee. Then you could compare those real life experiences to the perfectly photoshopped listing photos, and decide if the house was indeed what you expected.

Obviously this type of home-buying process doesn’t exist yet. But if I could give our clients one gift, that would be it. And we’d have to jump through some hoops to get the sellers on board – perhaps I show up with my newest footy pajamas and crash in the guest bedroom to make everyone more comfortable? Or for now, we can maybe take the lesson to spend a little more time, ask a few more questions, put on our anti-rose colored glasses to see past the lipstick and have a more critical eye. After all, the average length of homeownership spans more than the average relationship. And you spend way more time courting someone before walking down the aisle than you do before making the biggest purchase of your life. Today’s food for thought!

Thanks for being here with us. We’re so grateful you took the time to stop by! What do you think, do you like the sleepover idea? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!