Please help me get over the disappointment!

[Beetmuffin]

Me and DP saw a house a few months ago (our very first house viewing) that we absolutely loved. However, we lost out to a cash buyer.

Nothing we've seen since has come close to the standard of that house, or fits our needs as well. We turn up to viewings and the houses are nowhere near as nice as the photos, or have major flaws or compromises, and we leave disappointed. Whereas the house we loved massively exceded our expectations when we viewed it, and we came away so excited. Also I swear prices of new houses being added to the market are creeping up and out of affordable reach with every week that goes by?!

Any advice or words of wisdom to help me get over this setback would be appreciated. Have been saving for almost two decades to buy, and so very desperate to get out of the rental market. I just can't stop feeling sad about losing such a lovely house.

You lost out at the point you were excited, but it might not have been all that you hoped. I fell in love with my house on viewing, but having moved in there are lots of aspects of it that are much more annoying than I realised at the time. It's not terrible, there's still great points to it, but if I'd not got the house, I never would have seen those downsides.

Which is to say, it's a shame you missed out, but be carefully not to "Romeo and Juliet" that house.

Good luck on finding a great place.

You fell in love with the dream so you have to let it go. Maybe there were unseen problems that you don't know about, you would be so VERY lucky if it really was "perfect".

Perhaps set your sights a little lower and accept compromises to get yourselves on the ladder, with a few years of mortgage under your belt and knowing what does (and doesn't) work for you, you can look at buying your NEXT property?

My first house was horrible.
A poor, old fashioned design in terrible condition in a lousy area but it was mine (well, mortgaged but you know what I mean) and I leant a huge amount about decorating & DIY.
3-Years later I sold it and thanks to a rising market, the fact the house now looked so much nicer and I was able to increase my mortgage (my earnings had increased), I bought a nicer house which was far from being "perfect" but was partway there.

Try to move on. From experience, you see a house, love it to bits, buy and move in & then you start to see a lot of horror. Eg I viewed and loved my last property, paid cash & moved in only for me to find out the tiles in the bathroom was painted (although i knew I needed a new bathroom when I viewed, but I was expecting to manage bathroom for a year or so until I also found that showering upstairs meant it was raining downstairs in the kitchen & also found out when I moved in that I needed to rewire the entire house because it has not been updated for about 30 years. Oh, I also found a leak that no one knew the source of the lick even the insurance company came with fancy equipments to try to find it but no luck and a few more horrors. If I had seen all these, I would have paid lesser for the house 🤷🏽‍♀️

I get it. When we last moved we bid on a house that I absolutely loved, and even years later I still walk past and think ‘you could have been ours, I wonder what it’d be like living here’. But eventually we found a house that we also love very much (and could just about afford) so it’s just general musing.