Episode 5 "The House Was Perfect... Until the Neighbors"

You're not just buying the house. You're buying the neighbors.

In this episode of House Wars, Laura Valente breaks down the one thing buyers consistently overlook — and how it can blow up an entire deal. From the neighbor who invented wild stories about her client's Airbnb guests, to the Point Loma man who showed up at the door every week claiming he was God and demanding the keys, Laura shares real stories from the field that nobody talks about in real estate.

Plus — why "quiet street" means absolutely nothing, what HOA politics actually look like from the inside, and the simple thing you should do before you ever make an offer on a property.

You date the house. You marry the neighborhood.

House Wars with Laura Valente.

Transcript

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Have you ever walked into a house and just kind of feel it? Like before you even look at the kitchen, before you check the floors, something just kind of hits you. The light is doing exactly what it's supposed to. There is a candle burning that costs more than your car payment. Someone cracked a window, and the ocean breeze is just coming right in perfectly. The whole place smells like fresh paint. And you know somebody's got good taste. And you watch it happen in real time. The husband drifts towards the backyard. He's already imagining himself at the grill, you know. He hasn't grilled in four years, by the way, but suddenly he's into it. The wife is moving mentally towards the furniture, right? She's planning where everything is gonna go. The kids, they've already claimed their bedrooms upstairs, and they're arguing about who gets the one with the bigger closet. And then the realtor is standing in the corner doing math that they're definitely not sharing with anyone yet. And just for a second, everyone's just sort of super happy. Like they're already thinking the house already belongs to them. They've moved in mentally into this property. And then the garage door next door swings open. This motorcycle fires up. A dog absolutely loses its mind. Some guy, like a random guy, walks outside. He doesn't have a shirt on. He's got like his phone to his ear. He's yelling about something that sounds very personal. And there's just stuff everywhere. There's a yard that's been used as storage for the last decade. I know you guys have seen this, right? And just like that, this whole feeling evaporates. The husband, I'm I'm betting like he's stopped thinking about the grill by now. The wife's the furniture arrangement, that's out the window. That disappears. The kids are quiet finally. That's the part that the agents aren't putting in the brochure. You're not, you're not just buying this house right here. You're buying everything around it. The block, like the sounds that are around it, the energy. The people who live 20 feet away on the other side of a shared fence who you have not met and you did not choose. Sometimes that's the most expensive. People forget to factor in. I'm Laura Valente. This is House Wars. Welcome back. Today we're gonna go dive real deep. Not deep in our pockets this time. We're gonna dive deep into something that comes up constantly in real estate and that almost nobody talks about seriously until it's too late. And that's the neighbors. Yep, not the house, not the market. The neighbors, the actual human beings that are gonna live right next to the property that you're about to spend your life savings on. I've seen some beautiful deals fall apart because of one person next door. I've had deals where the neighbor situation literally became a genuine crisis. You know, I've had stories, real ones, um, where you're I'm gonna share on this podcast today that have actually personally happened to me that I think will change the way you look at buying a home. And the reason I want to tell you this is because when you select a realtor, and I hope that's me, but when you select a realtor, I encourage you to ask them, what is their process on buying a home? A lot of agents focus primarily on getting you that perfect house. But ask the right questions. What is their process? And if they don't mention at least going to the next door neighbors and knocking on the door and finding out who the heck lives next to them and maybe even across the street, then my personal opinion is they're not doing their diligence. So if you're driving, this is a great time to listen. Or if you're at home, get comfortable, grab a glass of wine, grab a glass glass of something, cup of coffee. If you want some whiskey, I'm not gonna judge you. Whatever you want. Let's get into it. I've been in so many showings, like hundreds at this point, and I will never stop being amazed by how long people will stand in a kitchen talking about cabinet hardware. Like 45 minutes on cabinet poles. Are they brush nickel? Are they brush mat? Do they match the faucet? Should they be longer? And I'm standing there thinking, okay, cool, but did anyone notice what's going on directly next door? Because that's where I'm looking. I have like buyers who are obsessing over the waterfall island and whether the pot filler is in the right spot. I'm outside, I'm listening, I'm looking over the fence, I'm clocking who's home, what's parked in the driveway, what is the energy feeling on that block? I'm a big believer in energy. So I like to talk about energy quite often. You know, there's here's the thing. I understand when buyers get distracted by finishes. I know stagers who do an immaculate job, and they are designed to do exactly that. The whole point of a well-staged home is really to make you feel something. It's to evoke a feeling on the buyer. It's to get you kind of emotionally attached before you start thinking critically about this decision. And it really does work, it works really well. Which is why I'm always surprised when I walk into a listing and it's not staged, but whatever. You can't do anything about the neighbor who power washes his driveway at 6:15 a.m. every Saturday morning. You cannot fix the family three doors down who lets their dogs bark from 6 a.m. to noon. And you really certainly cannot change this guy next door who has decided that his front yard is actually just an extension of his living room. Like these things are forever. So they come with the address. And no amount of renovation or money that you're gonna spend or do is going to touch them, touch them. So before you spend 45 minutes on cabinet poles in this kitchen, just go outside for 20 minutes. Just sit there and just listen. Look around. That information is free and it will tell you more about your future life in that 20 minutes in that house than any finish or feature inside of it, I assure you. So let me tell you about something that happened with one of my listings because this is interesting. I had a property, it was a really nice house, great layout, it was great bones. It should have moved really fast. It did eventually sell. But what was happening is the next door neighbor had this very uh, I want to call it. Uh, my dad had a really good word for this because he actually saw this house. Uh, he called it eclectic organic gardening. It was like overgrown shrubs, wild grass growing in all different directions. These plants that had clearly just been left to do whatever they wanted. It was very much this neighbor's own thing. It was a very personal style that did have some beautiful like roses and things. Honestly, some people came through the open houses and didn't even mention it. They didn't seem to care at all. You know, to them it was just a yard. But other buyers, they would walk right out back because that's where the view was. Everybody did that. When they came in the house, they walked straight towards the view. They would look over the fence, and you could literally watch their face shift, their whole expression. You can see that instantly something changed in their head, and they'd start coming over to me, walking over to me and asking questions, you know, saying, Hey, has anyone talked to her about this? Um, is this yard going to be maintained? What's the story going on over there in that yard? It kind of got complicated for me because I believe the real issue wasn't the garden. I thought the real issue was that if anyone said anything to this next neighbor about her yard, she would get super defensive because I tried to talk to her about it. I mean, like very offended. She would come over to me and say, Don't come to my property without, you know, with your opinions. She's like, Don't come over to my property and tell me how to garden. Don't tell me how to live my life. Look, I respect that. That's her property. She's not necessarily doing anything wrong. But what that means for the buyer next door is that, you know, this situation is not going to change. And if you move in and it bothers you, you're going to have to either live with it or have a very uncomfortable conversation with someone who has already made it, you know, very clear that she doesn't want to have that conversation. That's what people don't think about. It's not just what's happening, it's what the path to resolving it actually looks like. And sometimes that path is basically a wall. So we had buyers who walked away specifically because of that. Like nothing was wrong with the house. The house was beautiful, had an ocean view, it was gorgeous and beautiful neighborhood, gated community. It's just the dynamic next door and what it would mean for that buyer for a long term. It, you know, a lot of people decided not to put an offering on this home, you know. So, real quick, can we please talk about listings that describe a property as being on a quiet street? Well, what does that mean? Quiet according to who? Like the seller, because the seller has also been living there and maybe stopped hearing things a long time ago. Because some people get used to things. If you've ever lived in a city where there's a train, a lot of people will come in and they won't buy a property because they don't want to hear the train or they don't want to hear traffic. But a lot of people will say, well, you'll get used to it. The seller's version of quiet and your version of quiet might possibly be two completely different things. I love when a listing says quiet street and then you show up and there's a trampoline park two blocks over, or there's a busy intersection around the corner, or an Airbnb that has, you know, three houses down that has a turnover every four days. Or this is a good one, an HOA president who comes outside with what I can only imagine or describe as a tape measure every time a trash can is two inches out of alignment. Ooh, or, and this is a real category of neighborhood, a neighbor, the person who has decided that their feelings about your exterior paint color are actually community issue. This is very true. I was a host for an Airbnb in Point Loma in San Diego, and the neighbor called me and said, you need to tell your client to paint his house because the white is so bright, it is blinding me in my home. Believe it or not, I actually told her, well, that's good. You don't have to get an ITAN membership. It's giving you a suntan. She didn't like that. I was trying to be funny. I was trying to add a little levities to cheer her up. I did actually go and talk to my client and see if he would paint the house. But again, when you move into a neighborhood, you don't know who's around you and what complaints you're going to receive. So here's here's what I tell my buyers. Go back to the property at different times. Not just during the showing during the showing, because the showings, if there's another agent there, they're they're dolling that house up. You know, they're doing it at the best times. If it, especially if it's an open house. Go back on a Saturday morning around eight o'clock. Park your car in the street, roll the windows down, and just sit there for a few minutes. Don't don't be on your phone. Just just listen. And what do you hear? Like, what do you see? Who is outside? What is the foot traffic like? What's parked on the street? Are there tons of cars? Real estate is honestly, in my opinion, just anthropology with financing. Okay. It's like you have to observe people in their natural environment, not just this like curated everyone's on their best behavior version that happens during a two-hour open house window on a Sunday afternoon. Go when nobody knows you're watching. That's when you get the real picture, I think. So I want to talk about HOAs for a second because I think this deserves its own conversation. I'm actually going to have another podcast on specifically this. But if you are looking to live in a city like downtown San Diego, I sell a lot in downtown San Diego. Some HOAs are genuinely genuinely great. The neighborhood is well maintained, the rules make sense. People more or less follow them and everyone's reasonably happy. I've seen it. I think it does exist. However, there are HOAs that feel like a small local government, and that government got a little too comfortable with its own power and forgot what it was actually supposed to be doing. The thing about HOAs is you don't really understand what you're signing up for until you're living inside one. You can read the CCNRs or the, you know, the HOA docs. You can even sit in on a meeting, like a board meeting. But the actual culture of an HOA, who runs it, what they care about, what they enforce, and what they ignore, who has beef with who? That stuff doesn't show up show up in the HOA docs. You know, so suddenly you're getting violation letters about the color of your window shutters. There are parking disputes that have been going on since before you moved in and somehow you got pulled into them. There's like all these anonymous complaints. Nobody knows who's filing them. Nobody's gonna admit it about the things where you put your recycling bin on what kind of plants you have in your front yard. I don't know. I just feel like these things come up all the time. I want to say this clearly: luxury communities are sometimes the worst for this, and it's not about the money. I think it's about a certain kind of person who doesn't necessarily want control over themselves. I think they want control over everyone around them, and an HOA gives them a structure to do that with. I once watched a dispute between two neighbors in a very nice community go on for months. It wasn't over something even structural. It was literally over a patio umbrella. The angle of a patio umbrella. This wasn't noise like or safety. This was that was it, that was the issue. And it consumed months of board meetings and emails and at least one in-person confrontation in a driveway. Money does not fix dysfunction. It honestly just gives a nicer little backdrop and slightly better lawyers. That's what I say. I'm gonna tell you the craziest Airbnb neighbor story you'll ever hear. I'm gonna give you two of them. When I was managing Airbnbs as a host, the neighbor situation reached a whole new, different level. I had one property where we were consistently having really great guests. Um, we had MBA players, business people, just cool guests overall. And obviously, when you're running a short-term rental, there are going to be, you know, a few different faces every week, different cars in the driveway, people coming and going at different hours. I had a neighbor call me and say that there was a cult activity going on in the house. And I I honestly did not know how to respond. I mean, I don't, I wasn't in the house. I it's just the, you know, gosh. I mean, what do you respond to that? How do you, how do you talk the neighbor off the ledge there, you know? That's the one thing about neighbors and short-term rentals, or honestly, any situation where there's a lot of activity at a property. If nobody communicates with them, if nobody explains what's going on at all times, they will fill in the blanks themselves. It's always the worst version of what it could be to someone else. I had another situation, different property, where the neighbor just walked over one day and he just started cutting down my clients' bushes. There were tenants in the house in this uh Airbnb, and they were like, there's a man in the yard just cutting down these bushes. They came over with clippers. They came over, you know, thinking it was completely normal. They I just remember my client looking at the camera, going, Why is my neighbor in the yard? And then I had, you know, to be the intermediary of this and go and try to diffuse the situation and tell the neighbors, hey, you need to ask for permission before you walk onto someone's property and essentially trespass and you know cut down their bushes because you don't like them. It just, yeah, just a man on a mission with someone else's shrubbery. Oh, the one that really stayed with me, and I want to tell this one properly because it's wild. I was managing an Airbnb out in Point Loma, and this neighbor started coming by the property, knocking on the door, telling whatever guests happened to be staying there that he was God. He told them he was God and that they had to hand over the keys. He had this binder with him. It wasn't a Bible exactly, it was more like a personal journal or notebook covered in handwriting notes and scribbles of Bible verses, and that he was God, and that you had to hand over the keys because this was God's house. He would come back every day, and I kept getting calls from the guests. Laura, there's a man at the door. He says he's God and he wants the keys. What do you even say to that? Do you you gotta document it? You report it, you apologize to the guests profusely, but he kept coming back consistently, consistently, just like clock clockwork. Eventually, this house sold and he kept coming back to the new buyer. And it sold again and he kept coming back. He had no awareness that ownership had changed, or maybe he just didn't care. In his mind, the house was his and that was that. It went on for so long. I remember getting like a letter in the mail to like come to a court date about it to testify because someone had gotten so pissed off about this happening that they actually went and took it through legal the legal system. The house can be perfect in every way. Great bones, great location, beautiful finishes, everything you ask for. And there can still be something next door or right outside the door. And that could fundamentally, fundamentally change your experience of living there. So here's what I want to leave you with. When you're buying a home, and especially in this market where things move fast and you sometimes feel pressure to make quick decisions, I'm the kind of realtor that I want you to have the autonomy to make your own choice. And I'm I want you to have time to make that choice. I'm not gonna push you, I'm gonna guide you, right? I know that buying a house kind of presents this emotional pull, and it can make you skip the part where you actually pay attention to what's around it. Go outside, sit on the front steps for a few minutes, walk around the block, notice what the street feels like, look over the fence, pay attention to what's parked in the driveways, what's in the yards, and what you can hear. If you're serious about a property, go back at different times of the day and different times of the week. The house looks the same on Tuesday at 2 p.m. as it does on Saturday at 10. The neighborhood does not. Trust your gut. If something feels off, if there's a low level discomfort you can't quite name, don't brush past it. That feeling is usually picking up on something great. Follow your intuition. You date the house, you marry the neighborhood, and the neighbors, you know, they're the in laws you didn't know came with the deal. That's it for today, guys. I'm Laura Valente. Thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated with you, share with someone you know who's in the middle of buying right now. Because they might need to hear this before they close, not after. And if you got a neighbor story of your own, because I know you do, I know you have the tea, drop it in the comments. I read them. I'll see you soon.