Survey finds many home buyers expect to encounter remorse within a year

Buying a home is often a challenge, but many people are still ecstatic when they finally receive the keys to their new abode. Compared to renting, owning a home comes with more responsibilities and usually has higher costs due to the mortgage, utilities, and maintenance or repairs. But you'll also have a place to call your own and the chance to increase your wealth as monthly payments go toward the property's equity instead of a landlord.

Buyers may experience reticence about their purchase for a variety of reasons, from dissatisfaction with the neighborhood to unexpected problems with the property. But a recent survey by ValueInsured, a company whose key product allows buyers to recover their down payment or refinanced equity in the event of a market downturn, found that many people expect current buyers to feel remorseful about the price they paid for their home.

In a poll of a nationally representative sample of 1,002 American adults, ValueInsured found that 62 percent of respondents believe those who buy a home now will, within a year, think they paid too much for the property and have buyer's remorse. Current homeowners were even more likely to hold this opinion, with 69 percent holding this view.

Home prices have been climbing steadily for several years. In its latest report on existing home sales, for the month of May, the National Association of Realtors said the national median price for a U.S. home was $252,500. This was an all-time high and the 75th consecutive month of yearover-year price gains.

In the ValueInsured survey, a majority of respondents said they expect a correction in the housing market in the near future. Seventy-one percent of homeowners and 65 percent of non-homeowners said they believe such a correction will happen within the next one or two years.

Respondents were more likely to expect a correction in markets where there has been strong competition for available inventory and prices have been climbing quickly. Eighty percent of homeowners in Texas and 79 percent of homeowners in California said they think a housing correction will happen within two years. In Texas, 44 percent of homeowners said they think a correction is already underway.

Sixty-seven percent of all homeowners in the survey said they think people who purchase a home now are likely to overpay for the property, an opinion shared by 62 percent of non-homeowners. Sixty percent of homeowners and 55 percent of non-homeowners said they think people in their neighborhood are overpaying for the available homes for sale.

A smaller share of respondents said they think the remorse that current buyers might experience will be similar to that of buyers who bought shortly before the Great Recession, when home prices plunged dramatically over a multiyear period. One in four respondents felt this way.

ValueInsured noted a 2017 poll of 2,000 people by the real estate company Trulia. Half of all homeowners had a regret about their current home or the process they went through to acquire it. However, these regrets were mostly related to the size of the property, with 46 percent wishing they'd bought a larger or smaller home. The survey did not include an option for respondents to say they thought they had overpaid for their property, although 62 percent of all respondents said they thought housing costs had become less affordable since 2012.