punctilious - adjective - showing great attention to detail
Anxious to kickstart a new chapter in my life on the West Coast, I decided to sell my home in the Jersey suburbs myself with a generous portion of help from an associate, a former friend, turned beau, turned friend again, who happens to be a real estate agent. Of course, I am paying him something for his time as even one percent amounts to a comfortable chunk when the house is worth 750K. What started as an innocuous pairing of the Bobbsey Twins (I'm dating myself here) has segued into Beowulf and Wiglaf (now I'm really dating myself) as it is NOT easy to sell a house in this age of the punctilious and entitled. In fact, it was probably easier for Beowulf to slay the dragon because after all, he and Wiglaf did have knives, something no respectable seller can rely on when negotiating a sale with the buyer's cutthroat real estate attorney.
At present, most of the buyers out there are Millennials, a generation that is used to receiving trophies for showing up. Although most of them are intelligent, they seem to get away with doing comparatively little to earn their inflated salaries. Yet it probably isn't their fault entirely as it is easy to "quiet quit" when supervisors' expectations are low. Unfortunately, the lackadaisical attitude has carried over into real estate sales.
Twenty-five years ago, I was a single mom in my late thirties, fresh out of divorce court with a seven-year-old daughter who wanted to reside in a neighborhood of families with children. I was desperate to provide the right, healthy environment for her, so I bought an old, decrepit house in a solid environment and spent the next 24 years dumping money into the money pit, only to realize recently, much to my disappointment, that no matter what you spend and how much you do to improve your property, it is not good enough for these young, newly wed buyers who see the house as yet another potential trophy. The feeling is if they put up enough in the way of savings and loans and mom and dad's monetary gifts, the house should be picture perfect in every way regardless of its age. Sorry. It just doesn't work that way. Like the human body, no matter the age, continual maintenance is involved. There will always be something that needs attention.
This is a wake-up-and-smell-the-roses moment for all of you nouveau riche Millennials out there migrating from your primitive apartments in Brooklyn to the overpriced suburbs of New Jersey or Connecticut: If you buy a house, no matter how old or new it is, you are going to have to work and spend a lot of money to maintain the the luster of the trophy, no matter how it was obtained. Nothing will come easily. And in ten years, when you decide to sell your Cape Cod starter home in order to buy the McMansion dream, you must realize that even your township of record will try to take you down by dredging up open permits from before you even bought your place and then charging you $150 to inspect areas that have nothing to do with the open permits, only to fail you, again charging you another $150 to return after you have spent even more money to appease them. I just wrote over $500 in checks to my township this past week. Why they need this kind of cash is beyond me. You would think my 10K a year in property taxes would appease them. Think again. As a result of the shenanigans, I am beginning to put a lot of credence in conspiracy theories involving the government, any form of it at all.
For those of you Florida-bound-hopeful Boomers who are thinking of trying to take advantage of the current sellers' market by putting "For Sale" signs on your front lawns, think twice. No matter how much you have put into your houses to make them presentable, you are going to have to cough up a lot more because no Millennials want to buy fixer-uppers, for what should be obvious reasons by now. If there is too much to be done, save yourselves some aggravation and sell to builders. To these wet-behind-the-ears buyers, new is always better no matter how well built your Jazz Age, craftsman bungalows are.
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