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The narrative about desperation and elation when buying a house is well-worn. Not so many stories tell the relief of actually selling one, which is why a new British comedy film, The Trouble with Jessica, seems an intriguing pitch.
It has a classic English comedy set-up: a dinner party at a smart north London house, designed by the architect-husband. He and his wife are on the verge of signing the paperwork to sell up and have invited friends over for a final supper. As anyone who has ever seen a Harold Pinter play knows, the scene is just waiting to explode.
And so it does: the architect and his wife need to sell pronto because he’s almost sent them bust on another dream property development. A bon vivant novelist who lives alone in a central London flat turns up uninvited to dinner, suggests she’d had it off with everyone’s husband, then hangs herself in the garden, thus jeopardising the sale. “Why couldn’t she kill herself in her own garden?” exclaims the wife. “She doesn’t have a garden,” someone else points out.
The farce is moving the body before the buyer shows up. The comedy is the illusion that they are selling a happy house. There is a gentle lie in every property transaction: that it is an ever-appreciating and much-loved asset. Some sales are indeed because sellers are stepping up the housing ladder — well done to them. But, as often as not, it is due to some juncture in life — divorce, death, debt, or just a deep dissatisfaction with the life you had chosen. “Keen to sell” is what the estate agent will say.
So much is loaded into that initial idea that owning your own property is a route to happiness. Even the initial grazing of the photographs on estate agents’ websites — theme parks of domesticity painted every shade of Farrow & Ball — is dressed up to seem like a pleasure.
With every sinew of finance strained towards getting a mortgage and rival bidders hovering around, landing the house feels like an achievement — one for which the winner is paying, but that’s by-the-by.
Slowly, one forgets the hard work put in to obtain the property. Things break. Roofs leak. At times, it may feel a burden trying to finance a dream that has become a mundane reality. After all that effort, who would admit it might have been a failure?
A much-cited piece of research from 2009 by Grace Wong Bucchianeri, a professor of real estate at Wharton University, found that home ownership did increase a person’s happiness rating — but also their aggravation rating. Female homeowners put on weight, all saw less of their friends. Another study, published in 2022 by University of Basel researchers Reto Odermatt and Alois Stutzer, found that people significantly overestimated how happy it would make them.
There, of course, is the hokey answer to how a property improves your life: when it is loved, or that within it is loved. All the plants planted, pets petted, children raised and released off into their own lives. The home gains a value that isn’t tied to wealth or social status. We all know people who’ve deserved their homes not because they got the money together for them, but because they inhabit these homes with such delight.
But the house as a repository of wealth, pride and status anxiety? When those things are no more, the house turns again to bricks and mortar. It becomes stolid, an impediment to your own movement.
I can find no data for the happiness perceived on selling a house when negative circumstances arrive. Then again, the estate agent might not wish to convey the level of relief the vendors feel — optimism about life is everything in the housing market.
Nor can it be possible to quantify the bitterness of some non-homeowners when invited to the perfect dinner party in the perfect house with the perfect couple, a sub-theme of The Trouble with Jessica. Perhaps that’s why friendships go awry. As Wong points out, a good social group is actually one of the key indicators of happiness.
Buying a home is celebrated like you’ve hit the jackpot — even though it is very hard work for most people.
Selling that home is such a less glamorous affair, as you empty out the cupboards of years of detritus. But in some ways can be no less of a liberation. It might be nice to see the asset realised to allow you to make some new choices. But letting go is also admitting change is sometimes better than certainty. The real freedom is the ability to move, or move on.
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