The Tao Gals' Guide to Real Estate by Michelle Huneven

Author:Michelle Huneven
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781596919563
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

STORIES OUR REALTORS TELL

When they think that they know the answers,

people are difficult to guide.

When they know that they don't know,

people can find their own way.

WHAT'S THE BEST way to go about buying a house? The worst? The Tao Gals asked around for names of the top Realtors in the area and then met with three of them one by one to gather their pearls of wisdom. What stories, we asked, can you tell us that will shed light on women buying real estate?

James (Jamie) Foreman is a Realtor with Sotheby's International Realty Los Angeles. He's been working in real estate, both in New York and Los for nearly twenty-two years. Many of his clients are big names in the industry.

THINK ABOUT YOUR SELF-IMAGE. Where and how do you need to live to be the person you think you're meant to be? I'm not sure if the self-image question has more impact for women than men, but it has come up several times with the women clients I've worked with. In many cases, it's surprised me because I would have thought such successful people would be confident and settled on their own self-image. I think it may have surprised the buyers as well.

I worked with one woman, a film director-actor-writer, who was very successful. Her first film had won a prize at Sundance and she was moving to LA. She went out to buy a house and the whole question of self-image became a big deal. She had never thought she'd buy a house on her own—with no husband or family. The prospect of doing so got under her skin. She still lives in the house she bought with me—now with her husband and son. The house is worth three or four times what she paid for it and the experience worked out well, but that self-image thing was a tough hurdle to get over. Who would she be if she bought this house on her own? She had to grapple with that.

There's another instance where self-image played a big role. A friend of my wife, who's a big-name writer in New York, spent several years looking for an apartment. It wasn't her first apartment. She'd had a place in the Village and sold it for a good price. Now she was living in a hotel, trying to find a new place. She lived in that hotel for more than a year as she was looking to buy on the Upper West Side. She'd find very nice apartments, and each time she did, she'd bring her husbands—a progression of exs—to see the apartment. Invariably, one of them would tell her not to buy it. She kept bringing over people who would tell her not to do it.

I knew she couldn't stay in the hotel for the rest of her life. Finally we found a penthouse on the Upper West Side. It was a beautiful apartment. There were no more reasons she could come up with to not buy the apartment.

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