Does the Conflicted and Cynical Consumer Even Need an Agent Anymore?

Warning, readers, this is a pen name--so hold off on the cyber-stalking.

I don’t know a lot about real estate, per se, and my only experience with it all was when my husband and I bought a house with a partner at the very glossy apex of the housing bubble in 2006. The WAV Group asked me to share my perspectives on my homeownership experience, so here goes.

A broker we knew coerced us into buying a house by convincing us that our subprime loan would easily be refinanced two years later, maybe even at a profit. Being young and dumb with no real sense of how the housing market worked and drunk on the hope of actually living a life that resembled our parents (step one get married, step two buy house, step three have babies), we went into the deal with our eyes wide shut.  We told the broker we could only pay $4,000 per month in mortgage between the three of us, and he assured us that he had made that happen. When we got to the title company to sign our escrow papers, we noticed the mortgage on the paperwork was $4,450 per month. We should have walked away then, but we didn’t, and the surprises didn’t stop there.

Two years later we tried to refinance, as our broker and agent had told us to do (“no problem, housing prices are only going up!”). We went to bank after bank, and the answer was the same: the home we bought at $556,000 in 2006 now had the estimated value of $476,000. This drop happened over a period of nine months, and as each moment ticked away, that number grew smaller and smaller.