Buying a Home Is Stressful. It Doesn't Have to Be Miserable

By Will Fendon

For 20 years, Will Fendon has been a top-producing Realtor in Portland, Lake Oswego, West Linn, and surrounding areas.

If you’ve ever bought or sold a home, you already know moving is famously one of the most stressful things a person goes through, right up there with the big life events nobody signs up for on purpose.

After almost 20 years of doing this in Lake Oswego, we’ve watched a lot of wonderful, level-headed people get thoroughly frazzled by it. So we’ll tell you what we’ve learned: the stress is normal and unavoidable. The misery is optional. And most of the difference comes down to a few things people figure out too late.

Know where the stress really comes from. It usually isn’t the house. It’s the uncertainty stacked on top of a deadline: not knowing if your offer will win, if your own home will sell in time, if the inspection will turn up something ugly, all while you’re trying to hold down a job and keep your family fed. Naming that helps more than you’d think. Once you see that the pressure is coming from the unknowns and the timeline, not from some failure on your part, you can actually do something about it, which is mostly getting good information faster so fewer things stay unknown.

Don’t take the bumps personally. Expect the process to test your patience, and decide that in advance. Deals wobble. A lender needs one more document. An appraisal comes in a hair low. Something you loved falls through, and something better shows up two weeks later. We’ve genuinely seen just about everything at this point, and the pattern we notice is that the people who come through it happiest are the ones who treat the bumps as normal weather rather than personal catastrophe. It’s not that nothing goes sideways. It’s that they’ve braced for a little sideways and don’t let it ruin the whole trip.

Protect the fun part. Because there is one. Somewhere under the paperwork and the deadlines is the actual reason you’re doing this: a new chapter, a better fit for your family, a place you’ll make memories. It’s easy to lose sight of that around week three of escrow. We try to keep pointing our clients back to it, because a move is one of the few stressful things you go through that’s supposed to end somewhere good. If you never look up from the logistics, you miss the whole point.

Let the right team carry it. We’ll be honest that this is the part we’re biased about, but the right team absorbs a huge amount of the stress that would otherwise land on you. A lot of what wears people down is logistics: coordinating showings, chasing paperwork, staging advice, knowing which fixes are worth it and which aren't, reading the market so you're not guessing. That’s the stuff we do all day, every day, and handing it off is the single biggest thing that turns a miserable move into a merely busy one. You still have to live through it. You just don’t have to carry all of it.

So yes, your move is probably going to be stressful, we’d be lying if we promised otherwise, and after 20 years we’ve stopped promising things we can’t deliver. But stressful and miserable aren’t the same thing, and the gap between them is mostly good information, steady expectations, and not having to do it alone.

If you’re thinking about buying or selling around Lake Oswego, West Linn, or Portland and you’d like the process to feel more human than harrowing, reach out. Call or text us at (503) 432-5450, email us at will@fendonproperties.com, or visit fendonproperties.com. We’ve seen just about everything this business can throw at a person, and we’d love to make your move one of the good ones.