Buyers remorse

[Whatsinaname99]

My husband and I just bought a house in London. We’ve moved in and I hate it. And we’ve realised we’ve overpaid by potentially £100,000. The house itself is lovely and it’s in the catchment area for an outstanding school but the street is noisier than I remember and busier with traffic. The neighbourhood is also rougher than I remember. We were looking for a house for so long that we just jumped at a house that was finally nice and had a good primary school nearby and what we were looking for. I feel sick to the stomach thinking about how horrible the area and the street are and can’t stop beating myself up about the fact that I didn’t realise it. Not to mention there is no way someone else would pay this much. So we can’t really afford to sell it.
I don’t know what to do and how to get over it. Maybe someone has been in a similar position and can help share how they overcame this feeling.

So sorry OP. I think this will be me in a year. We have to move for DH's work and the price of houses in new area is just silly so we will end up with something which is a compromise in more ways than one. I'm gutted and dreading it.

About a month after moving in, I had a major wobble. The (minor, but we will want sorting) issues had come to light, but it wasn't "ours" yet. 6 months further down the line, and there is still stuff we want to do, but we've met the neighbour's, found our way around and are much more settled.
How long have you been moved in?

Thank you for the message of hope ! We’ve been here a 3 weeks. And I can see how I can make the house really “ours”. But I can’t get over the huge mistake we’ve made with the location and the street :-(

This is exactly how i feel. 8 months later and still hate the house & wish I hadn’t moved.
we are now looking at selling, probably at a loss too

I think most people who bought recently have buyers remorse

The point is to remember it's not 'you', the last couple of years have been crazy and inhumane for people moving/buying. The system in this Country is broken. You're beating yourself up for something that you didn't do.

It's really hard to predict how you will feel in the future. We spent so long trying to find the ideal house last year, that we lost our buyer and haven't moved at all. Part of me wishes we'd been less fussy and just accepted a house with a smaller or garden or less space. It's really difficult when there aren't many houses to choose from or you don't have the budget you need to get the perfect house.
Hopefully in time the area will become more like home to you.

Good luck! I hope you find something you love. Learn from my mistake I guess - do major research on the location

Sorry to hear :-( fingers crossed you don’t make a loss

We did this and moved after 2.5 yrs. broke even after making the same profit that we’d spent on moving x 2 and doing it up
worked out for the best in the end
gwt thé kids in the good school, get the inside and direct outside nice and see how much time you end up spending outside your own home. Might be great for 5 yrs

we were FTB and I had horrific buyers remorse for months, lead to crying every day, really bad anxiety, falling out with friends etc. we were searching for months and kept getting outbid. we were fed up and just went straight in with an over asking offer. Missed all the rubbished and bodged jobs. Survey was really shoddy. I’ve seen houses in the area/ same street completed around the same time for 12k less than we paid. And we have to do another 40-50k of works at least. Our attached neighbour is awful.

i’m better than I used to be but still have some low days. Things that have helped me/ us
-we painted the rooms a really bright colour so those rooms look nothing like our old rental houses or the one we bought.

-i focus on how great DP has been through all of it and that the house is just a place we live

-I appreciate that all our other surrounding neighbours are lovely.

-I avoid the kitchen on a bad day. It is really gross, much worse than we realised when we viewed, and worse than the surveyor said, and we were going to redo it but can’t because the roof needs replacing.

-we started doing more ‘normal life’ things. For over a year our lives have mainly been house things (searching, buying, renovating etc) and it feels like this crappy money pit is my whole life when it’s really not.

-trying self compassion, and accepting that we did the best we could in a horrible system.

Shoddy service = surveyor said certain a things were ok or would cost a few hundred to fix which turned out to be wrong.

Make a plan. It will help. How long until you get the kids into the secondary school (assuming you need to)? Can you try to aim to do that, then you can move anywhere you want. If you don’t think you can make it that long, try to give yourself next year, do some decent stuff to the house to make it as family friendly for older kids as possible and then move. Traffic can change (loads of low traffic zones in London now). You might have had a bad start to the area- when I first moved to the city I saw 3 thefts on the tube in a week, 20 years later never seen another! Plus I lived in a truly naice part of Kensington for 2 years and had 2 murders on my street so you can’t judge by appearances!

Is the time of year not helping? To be honest most places look gloomy and shoddy at the moment. Maybe see if spring helps then summer. It might make a difference.

I think you may be having a panic. Surely if the house is in catchment for good schools it can't be a very rough area?

I think something has triggered your anxiety and now everything you see and hear just confirms your fear.

Other than more traffic, what makes you think it is a bad area?

Even if it is a dodgy area, I have raised my kids in appalling areas (kept awake by drug dealing round them back of the house) and we are fine and the kids secure and well behaved>

Thank you this is so helpful. Especially trying the self compassion. and appreciating family and friends

@Newhousecrying
accepting that we did the best we could in a horrible system.

Took me about 6 months of counselling to reach the above conclusion. Your story is similar to mine, surveyor missed stuff things leading to over 50k of repairs. Felt like every day was dominated by the house which dragged on and on.

Stopped directing anger inwards and started directing it at the people that created this ridiculous system and eventually accepted it.

OP we've just moved from a flat ti a house in London too. We moved about half a mile out of our desired search area because we got completely priced out where we wanted to be. My husband loves it but I have massive regret, it's too far away from the school we go to, from friends, from all amenities. There's so much renovation work to do (another compromise) which is making me miserable. We didn't overpay in the end but also I doubt we got the bargain I thought we had as it requires way more work than we realised.
We moved in three months ago. We've done a bit of decorating which helps.
Can I ask which area roughly you're in? Sometimes places seem less desirable when you haven't got to know them yet but you do feel part of the community. I'm hoping that happens for us

I’m hoping we start to feel part of the community but I am struggling with it I must admit.
we’re in finsbury park

Total buyers remorse here and I'm a year in. Development was brand new so had no idea how loud, rude and trashy 90% of my neighbours turned out to be! Bin day is like a ticker tape parade. Thankfully only have the minimum invested in the house so will spend this year saving and 2024 moving!

I'd love to think we could move in, say, five years when we've done all the renovations and at the point we'll be thinking about secondary schools. But my DH thinks this is our forever home. It's just not what I imagined. Like everyone else we were destroyed by last year's mad price rises and were outbid on everything we thought we could get. Size wise it's the right property but everything else about it is just a bit wrong. I can't ever imagine feeling truly at home tbh.

Finsbury Park is really nice - I'm sure you'll settle OP. Wait til early summer when you can have a long boozy afternoon in the garden at the faltering fullback. And you're walking distance to Crouch End for restaurants and cafes etc?

Another one in the same boat 👋 as others have said I think this is really quite common given the market; we bought earlier this year and after being outbid on everything we wanted we ended up buying something I never in a million years would have otherwise considered.
like a previous poster I had such a difficult time once we moved in (it sounds dramatic but the realisation that we had bought this house once we were in was horrific and I became quite depressed). 6 months on and I am starting to feel slightly better. Things that have helped are lots of houseplants, even repainting (helped to get rid of any trace of the previous owners). Remembering that nothing is forever, yes I would like to move but it isn’t feasible at the moment- I’m making a 4 year plan, do as much as we can to the house with a view that we will move at the end of our fix. Using this purchase as a way of learning i guess; I know what I would and wouldn’t look for the next time we buy.

I know it’s easy to say but do try and focus on the positives. So for us location is far better than the house itself, we are within walking distance of my daughters school, houses don’t come up round here too often and the house is much bigger than our previous house. There is a play park at the bottom of the road that we went to every night in the summer so I’m looking forward to lighter evenings when we can do that again.

any renovations we make will ultimately make the house better for us; whether that is painting or more expensive structural works.

you may feel better in time OP, a lot of people said this to me at the time we moved and I couldn’t see it. I dreamt about the house every night, hated it and believed that everyone in the area thought we were absolutely idiots for buying it (also went in way over asking price to secure it). I by no means love it, and don’t want to stay here long term but it has got better.

On really bad days I try and think of the positives for my family; ie my daughter is within walking distance to her school friends, she loves the house (she’s 5 so maybe this is more to do with age). I’ve tried to do fun things so we associate that with the house rather than my negativity; ie we do lots of baking, I get my daughter involved in the decorating, we talk every day about how amazing it is that she lives so close to her friends.

we also had a lot of unexpected work to do; we now need to buy new windows which is soemthing we knew needed doing at some point but didn’t expect to need doing so quickly. We can’t afford it but I try and see it as a positive in that it’ll be something else that we have done to make this house better for ourselves.

This is so us! It’s so nice to know we’re not the only ones. Weeks after we got the keys i realised we had written of a (cheaper) house a few months before we saw this one because the upstairs (which is exactly the same as we have now) was too small. It just looked different because the first house wasn’t furnished so all the rooms looked tiny and we couldn’t imagine furniture fitting in it. And I was crushed that we’d been so foolish.

we made a list of all things we learned/ did ‘wrong’ with this house and what to do and look out for next time. we call this our ‘learning house’