What's your real estate pet peeve?

[Anonymous]

I say this every time so I will say it again: when you open the front door and the staircase is RIGHT in front of you. It feels confrontational to me.

For anyone tired of hearing me say that, here's another one: when the side of the bathroom vanity/sink is not flush against the wall, leaving a half inch gap where things can fall down but you'll never be able to get them. I've been seeing that more and more.

Lastly, I hate pedestal sinks. Have since the first time I saw one as a child.

[Anonymous]

No floor plans. We purchased a house a few years ago and over half of the houses had no floor plans.

[Anonymous]

Open floor plan because they're too cheap to pay for walls. It's a sound nightmare.

[Anonymous]

No bathroom on main/first floor. This is a deal breaker for me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Mine is oversized houses 5k+ sq ft that result in stupidly large bedrooms upstairs. I don’t need a sitting room in my bedroom, I need well planned, smart layouts.

Agree. I really don't like these very large McMansion style houses with enormous footprints meaning vast wasted spaces upstairs and huge bedrooms and galleries and bonus rooms. I don't mind a proper mansion or anything very well designed, but there's a lot of wasteful square footage in these kinds of houses that would only annoy me.

I'd much rather have a well-planned 3k sqft house in the right location than a 6k sqft that's really 2k of pointless "finished basements" and another 2k of pointless suites and second family rooms.

[Anonymous]

The fisheye/wide angle lens photos making spaces look larger than they are, taken at angles meant to hide weird layout. It's dishonest, and a waste of the buyer's time when they go to a view a property and see it's actually cramped and poorly laid out.

[Anonymous]

Vinyl plank flooring

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Mine is oversized houses 5k+ sq ft that result in stupidly large bedrooms upstairs. I don’t need a sitting room in my bedroom, I need well planned, smart layouts.

Same. We bought at a terrible time and there wasn’t much to pick from so we ended up with what seems like a ton of sq footage but it’s so much wasted space, it doesn’t seem big. I’d love a classic floor plan with walls and no weird corners.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I say this every time so I will say it again: when you open the front door and the staircase is RIGHT in front of you. It feels confrontational to me.

For anyone tired of hearing me say that, here's another one: when the side of the bathroom vanity/sink is not flush against the wall, leaving a half inch gap where things can fall down but you'll never be able to get them. I've been seeing that more and more.

Lastly, I hate pedestal sinks. Have since the first time I saw one as a child.

This is so funny to me. I know you’ve been here forever and shared this before and I think of you sometimes when I look at houses lol. But a staircase in the entry is one of the most classic, traditional elements in homes. My parents have a Victorian house and both front doors open to a foyer that is alllll about the staircase. What era of home doesn’t have a staircase in the entry? A ranch?

[Anonymous]

Enhanced color photos. Some are so extreme and nowhere near realistic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The neighborhood descriptions are my biggest pet peeve...descriptions like "desirable" and "highly coveted" and "sought after"...its often too generous of a description.

I also recently saw a neighborhood described as "bucolic" Someone clearly has been using their thesaurus!

My favorites are "prestigious" and "luxury." Everything "luxury" now, even the terrible cheap flips!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I say this every time so I will say it again: when you open the front door and the staircase is RIGHT in front of you. It feels confrontational to me.

For anyone tired of hearing me say that, here's another one: when the side of the bathroom vanity/sink is not flush against the wall, leaving a half inch gap where things can fall down but you'll never be able to get them. I've been seeing that more and more.

Lastly, I hate pedestal sinks. Have since the first time I saw one as a child.

This is so funny to me. I know you’ve been here forever and shared this before and I think of you sometimes when I look at houses lol. But a staircase in the entry is one of the most classic, traditional elements in homes. My parents have a Victorian house and both front doors open to a foyer that is alllll about the staircase. What era of home doesn’t have a staircase in the entry? A ranch?

+1

I think of staircase PP, too, weirdly enough. She started a movement.

[Anonymous]

We’re condo shopping right now. A bunch of my peeves have already been mentioned, including the lack of floors plans. My new gripes are:
- being too cheap for a matterport 3d tour on expensive listings
- photos of random filler crap, like old town views, del ray, the nearby metro. One condo even showed the little chair and table area by the elevators which seemed like an attempt to pretend the condo had an extra den
- using the fake AI remodel as if it’s an actual photo, including one time as the main listing photo

[Anonymous]

Something I'd never buy is one of those split level houses where you go in the front door and there's a small landing but then just stairs in two directions. One of the houses I lived in when I was a kid had this and I remember we always struggled when we had groceries or anything big to bring in. Also if anyone left anything on the landing it quickly became a stair tripping hazard.

When I was house hunting around here I ran into a surprising number of houses with that setup.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I say this every time so I will say it again: when you open the front door and the staircase is RIGHT in front of you. It feels confrontational to me.

For anyone tired of hearing me say that, here's another one: when the side of the bathroom vanity/sink is not flush against the wall, leaving a half inch gap where things can fall down but you'll never be able to get them. I've been seeing that more and more.

Lastly, I hate pedestal sinks. Have since the first time I saw one as a child.

This is so funny to me. I know you’ve been here forever and shared this before and I think of you sometimes when I look at houses lol. But a staircase in the entry is one of the most classic, traditional elements in homes. My parents have a Victorian house and both front doors open to a foyer that is alllll about the staircase. What era of home doesn’t have a staircase in the entry? A ranch?

+1

I think of staircase PP, too, weirdly enough. She started a movement.

LOL I think of her too! I laugh because the stairs were right in front of the front door in our Victorian rowhouse and I loved it.

We bought a house last year and the front doors open into a foyer with a wall in front of the doors. The stairs are at the left part of the foyer. One architect suggested that we move the stairs so they're not in the foyer at all. That was such a weird idea to us. Why would we want to have to do extra walking every time we come and go? Plus putting us in the foyer puts us in the center of the house so it's quicker to get anywhere rather than if the stairs were off to one side of the house.

I thought of the confrontational stairs pp and how she would have moved the stairs so she wouldn't have to look at them, the same way I place my bra and underwear under my clothes when I have to wear an exam gown. Dirty stairs lol.