The golden rule when looking for a property to buy: There will always be another house

Panic when you’re in the process of buying property and you can potentially make the biggest, most expensive mistake of your life.

So says former psychologist Peter Quarry who has been through the buy/sell/buy cycle eight times since purchasing his first Melbourne property for $32,000 in 1982.

“That’s a lot of experience,” he says, “especially when you can look at 10 to 50 houses each time you set out to buy.”

Quarry, now a public speaker, believes that now the heat is starting to come out of the market, particularly in Sydney, “the sense of buyer panic should diminish because prices are not going up so quickly”.

But even in a pressured market, he believes it’s prudent to remember “it’s not a race. You can slow down. You can take your time.

“Peter’s Golden Rule is: There will always be another property.”

In a national Australian property scenario that sees some 500,000 houses and units change ownership annually, he has a strong point.

Yet the route to finding and landing your next home is prone to high anxieties and stresses because “it’s such a big decision financially and also, a big deal on an emotional level”.

The emotional charge is a force, he says, “because you are bringing into reality a whole lot of dreams and fantasies that you have about your life”.

“At open for inspections you are fantasising your future life in situ. The place is a physical space that you can project into and imagine your life there,” he says.

“Some places don’t feel right. But some do as a house where you can actualise your dreams. ‘This is it! This is the one!’ It’s similar to finding a new partner.

“That’s why if you miss out at an auction or on buying a specific property you really wanted, you can be so disappointed. You’ve just invested a whole lot in this process”.

Having missed out, you are back on the search treadmill and right back into “the repeat cycle of hope, dreams, perhaps the reality that you did not succeed, and being disappointed all over again. In fact, you might go through this anxiety-inducing cycle multiple times”, Quarry says. “You might go through it 10 or 15 times.

“And the more times it happens, the more stress can accumulate and this can lead to emotional exhaustion and possibly too, conflict with your partner.”

At this point you are in a white hot danger zone. “Emotional exhaustion can lead to poor decision making. You make poor decisions because you just want it to be over”.

“Panic is anxiety on steroids.”

By poor decisions, Quarry cites a compromised choice; a house with one good room but many other faults. Or, overpaying or buying the wrong house altogether?

These undesirable and unbelievably expensive outcomes can all be mitigated, Quarry says, by repeating this manta:

“There will always be another one.”

So the tips are:

• Slow down.
• Don’t make poor decisions just to end the anxiety.
• Widen your search criteria because that might allow you to see a property in a suburb you may not have considered. In short, challenge your preferences.

Quarry admits that when searching for a place to call home “you cannot be totally rational.

“But don’t let emotions drive the process. Put them in the back seat. And certainly don’t give panic a voice.

“There will always be another one.”