My parents bought and sold houses about every 5-7 years when I was growing up, but I have never purchased a house. Not only do I want to in the nearer than not future, but I’m inheriting their house. The problem was that I know absolutely nothing about real estate.
The first two weeks of April were very slow, so I took off to Arizona to see my boyfriend and his kids. On the road I listened to an audiobook about the basics of real estate, which led me down a YouTube rabbit hole of people helping people pass the real estate licensing exam, to me now registering for an actual real estate class at the community college.
My boyfriend thinks I’m going to be an agent! I didn’t sign up for this for a career change, I genuinely wanted to learn it. My dad took a real estate class when I was little, and my mom said he wanted her to take it too but her exact words to me about the topic were “I didn’t want to sit through no stupid class”.
On the drive from Houston to Phoenix, I listened to this playlist two and a half times and really learned a lot of “real estate vocab terms.” There are 255 terms in that playlist. I knew about 1/3 of them. I didn’t know another 1/3. The last 1/3, I had heard about in real life but didn’t know what they meant. Educating myself on this topic has been cathartic in a kind of weird way. I am realizing that not only did my parents and other adults in my childhood not teach me this stuff, but it almost seems like they went out of their way to keep me ignorant on the topic. It’s almost like I was taught deliberately to focus on things that either didn’t matter or would affect me negatively but when it came to this, something practical that can actually build wealth, I was kept in the dark.
If I approach my mom about this, she gets defensive. She said, “Well I didn’t know anything about real estate either, except what I had to know to buy and sell all those houses over the years.” And I was like, “That’s actually my point!” But you can’t argue with my mom. I finally just started asking her questions about her different experiences as I learned different terms. For instance, when she and my dad made counter-offers, when did buyers request repairs after home inspections and so on. A month ago, that last sentence would have sounded like a foreign language to me!
I’m back in Houston now, and class starts in the beginning of June. I’m looking forward to it.
My boyfriend’s dog died two days after I left. She was 14.
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