My friend’s press-ganged me into going house hunting with them a fortnight ago. We saw, what felt like 375 houses.
They found one they liked. It was old, big, ugly, comfortable, in a nice neighborhood and had plenty of room for growth and lawns.
However, after the put in an offer, they discovered that the reason it was being sold was since the previous owners got divorced (its a Court ordered sale as they could not figure out how to decide who gets what).
And no my very pregnant-going to have a baby friend does not want to buy it, because of its… “bad luck”.
I can understand for a murder or something, but come on. This is literally 90% of the reason why a good house suddenly comes on the market underpriced.
Yeah - our prev house was sold pursuant to a divorce. Closing/possession had some hassles, as the H was living there, and the sale of the house was going to be the final aspect of their separation. (He kinda trashed it the day before close.)
So many folk get divorced, I can’t imagine narrowing prospective houses to exclude those.
I know a lot of people with odd reasons for wanting or not wanting a certain house; a color it was once (not currently) painted is the oddest example that springs to mind. Death, divorce, bankruptcy and other forms of bad ju-ju among them. I take it in stride anymore. Something like a body count actually makes a house more interesting to me (our guest bedroom/office where I am typing this has had two people die in it) but in that I seem very much to be the exception among my circle of friends.
One that baffles me is when people won’t buy a house because of the furniture, the decor, or the color of the walls. Um, the furniture and decor will go with the sellers, and walls are easily painted.
We got a great deal on a house once because the owner was a hunter and he had all manner of taxidermy trophies - including a standing bear. Yeah, I hated all the dead animals, but even if they’d conveyed, they’d have been tossed when we moved in. But we’re pretty sure that’s why the house was on the market so long.
Our current house was hideous when we bought it - built and decorated in 1975, and mostly stuck there. We saw past the Z-brick and the gawd-awful paneling and wallpaper and orange-and-yellow carpet, and within 4 months, we’d overhauled most of it. Granted, being DIY-types, it was cheaper than having someone else do the work, but still, it wouldn’t have cost all that much to do a quick initial upgrade.
Death or divorce would never enter into the equation, provided the body had been removed and we didn’t get custody of any spouse or kids.
I would scoff at the “bad luck” reasoning, because superstition.
OTOH, I might be reluctant for equally superstitious, but not supernatural, reasons. Like, the house is being sold pursuant to a contentious breakup, and both parties know where it is (because they lived there). Do I want to get embroiled in any post-divorce unpleasantness? Places in peoples’ lives can have great emotional resonance and I could imagine bad memories plus poor impulse control might mean things happening that SHOULD have nothing to do with me.
We bought our house 21 years ago. When we found it (during an open house), and were talking with the realtor, she told us that the seller was a recently-widowed young man (younger than we were, even), with an infant. He and his wife had bought the house several years earlier, as their “starter house.” They’d had a baby daughter, and the wife died of complications from the childbirth a few weeks after giving birth. He decided to sell, and move about an hour away, so he could be closer to his family.
Obviously, if you believe in bad luck / supernatural wooj, upon hearing that story, this would have been a house you would have avoided. We clearly weren’t bothered by it.
If the house is sold and both erstwhile partners get their share and no longer have any connection, why would they care about it? And why should you care why the previous owners sell it unless it’s for problematic things, like poor foundations, built on problematic soil, high levels of contamination in groundwater, being on a flood plain etc. How does it affect you even if they divorced cause she screwed all the neighbours or he was a heroin addict since that should not hopefully apply to you? (I have no idea what caused the end of the marriage in the OP, I just gave two wild examples).
:rolleyes:
Yes. A country with a pretty high (and increasing) divorce rate. And what relevance does that have to the issue?
We recently moved into a place that was on the market being a full remodel flip. Everything inside is new!
A neighbor shared with me that the previous resident owner had been hauled away by the FBI. And the one before that - the husband had pushed the wife down the stairs and broke her neck (she survived). SO, it has some interesting history at least!
I actually bought a house under some unfortunate circumstances. The sellers seemed highly motivated, we closed the deal at a good price and blindingly fast, and about two days later the husband turned the proceeds into cash and disappeared with the woman he’d been having an affair with. It turns out he’d surmised that it was a lot easier to abscond with the cash than split the house with his wife in the divorce proceedings.
It made it a little awkward bumping into his wife in the supermarket afterwards.
