Three Things We Wish Every Buyer Knew Before Looking for Their Next Home
We’re getting a very big, very cool house ready to come to market right now. It’s the kind of place that tends to polarize people.
Some walk in and think, I have always wanted to live in a grand old house like this. Other people start mentally cataloguing everything they would need to do before they could feel comfortable there, multiply that list by the square footage and promptly freak out.
I understand both reactions.
I’ve always thought it would be fun to live in a great big grand house. I have also thought about what would happen if I woke up in one at 3 a.m. and heard something suspicious downstairs.
My first thought?
Nope.
Cooper stays exactly where he is. Make sure the dogs are inside. Throw the deadbolt. Wren may only be 40 pounds, but she has a booming enough voice that perhaps whatever is downstairs will assume she’s a Rottweiler. Whatever it is can wait until sunrise.
And come to think of it, that isn’t so different from the way a lot of people are approaching buying a house right now.
Would I be crazy to give up my interest rate? Is our current house good enough for a while longer? Is it a stupid time to stop renting? What if rates change? What if insurance gets worse? What if I start looking and find out I can’t afford the thing I actually want?
Door locked. Dogs inside. We’ll see what things look like in the morning.
Except morning keeps coming.
Eventually, people roll all of that avoidance up into six words:
It seems like too much work.
They mean the house they can afford doesn’t feel turnkey. They mean getting approved feels like a lot of work. They mean researching how to do something in a less conventional way feels like work. They mean figuring out whether the scary headline actually applies to them sounds exhausting.
No single thing necessarily stops them. It all creates enough negative momentum to keep them exactly where they are.
But what if you could outsource some of that?
You don’t need to become a mortgage strategist, insurance expert, contractor, appraiser and economist before you’re allowed to want a different life. You don’t even need to know yet whether the thing you want is possible.
You need to want it enough to find out what the work actually is—and let somebody help you solve the puzzle.
That’s really what we mean when we talk about taking the scaries out of buying a home. Not eliminating risk. Making the unknowns known enough that you can decide which risks actually apply to you, what it would take to solve for them and whether the whole thing is worth it.
So whether you’re looking in New Orleans or somewhere else entirely, here are three things we wish every buyer knew before deciding whether to unlock the door.
The truth is, buyers never went away.
Homes have continued to sell in New Orleans through higher rates, insurance upheaval, economic uncertainty and all the other reasons we’ve been given to wait. So while it can sometimes feel as though everything is sitting on the market and nobody in their right mind is buying, clearly somebody is.
Who are these people? What do they know that you don’t?
Probably not some secret about what happens next.
What they often know is what the risk looks like for them.
We recently represented a couple who asked me point blank, “Are we crazy for pursuing this?”
There were reasons to ask.
He is in his 30s, self-employed, has restored property locally before and owns more than one successful investment property. His experience is real, but he doesn’t have the 20-year track record of a 55-year-old with a dozen properties, and his credit wasn’t beautiful.
She, on the other hand, had outstanding credit but much more finite access to capital. They aren’t married yet. And the property they had fallen for was commercially zoned on a major New Orleans avenue, flanked by commercial neighbors, directly across from a hospital and had been sitting on the market for literally years.
It was charming. It was unique. More than 40 buyers had toured it and walked away.
It also came with a foundation problem estimated at roughly $100,000.
On paper, you almost wanted to Frankenstein the two buyers together. Take his assets, renovation experience and ability to execute. Take her credit profile. Add a little more conventional income and capital. Present that imaginary person to the bank.
Except that person didn’t exist.
These two did.
So when they asked me if they were crazy, my answer was essentially, “I think you’re fracking nuts. But I also think it’s going to take somebody who’s fracking nuts to save this property, and you are absolutely nuts about it. So let’s figure out what it would take to get you into it. Then you can decide whether it feels worthwhile.”
Because are we crazy? wasn’t actually the useful question.
We brought in my go-to VIP lender and explored financing that could work with who these buyers actually were and what they were trying to do. Ultimately, we found a path that got them into the property, funded the foundation project and gave them room to tackle more. Their plan also created a path toward opening up a raised-basement apartment that could add income sooner rather than later.
No wedding vows required.
They are still in it. Based on their Instagram Stories, it is stressful. I am quite certain there are moments when one or both of them wonders what the hell they’ve done.
The good news is, when something goes bump at 3 a.m., it isn’t the house falling down. We solved for that one already.
More than 40 other buyers looked at that property and couldn’t make the risk worthwhile for themselves. They weren’t wrong. These two looked at the same risk, figured out what it would actually take to manage it and made a different decision.
They aren’t wrong either.
That is what a lot of the people buying right now know. Not that there is no risk. They know enough about their risk to decide whether to move forward.
A month or two ago, I told another real estate agent that the market seemed like it was trying to tell us something that hadn’t shown up in the reporting yet. A few weeks later he called me and said, essentially, What is happening? I’m suddenly getting all these buyer calls.
I told him it felt like Thriller. They’re all coming up out of the grave.
I don’t think those buyers received some secret memo saying rates are about to plummet or every problem in the housing market has suddenly disappeared. Some of them may simply be tired of waiting for perfect and willing to find out what buying now would actually mean for them.
That’s a much more useful exercise than asking whether this is universally a “good time to buy.”
We went deeper into why buyers are moving even when the prevailing narrative says wait in the first installment of our Taking the Scaries Out of Buying in New Orleans series.
Fair.
Maybe you can get comfortable with the things sitting directly in front of you. But what about the thing you don’t know yet? What if you begin your search and rates move? What if insurance changes? What if lending guidelines change? What if the rules move again and you have to learn a whole new thing?
Here is both the good news and the bad news: things change all the time.
If you don’t like the current environment, wait. It will change. Does that mean you’re going to like whatever replaces it? Nope. You might. You might also find yourself missing the thing you were complaining about six months earlier.
What helps is understanding what could be changing, why it is changing and whether it actually matters to your decision.
We happen to have a perfect example coming almost immediately after this article was originally published. Beginning November 2, 2026, new appraisal reports submitted through the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac system move to the new UAD 3.6 reporting standard. It replaces the old static structure with a more dynamic, data-driven format intended to capture property and market information more consistently. Read more at Fannie Mae.
Now imagine encountering a headline:
HOME APPRAISALS ARE CHANGING NOVEMBER 2.
Sounds ominous.
Once you understand what is actually changing, considerably less so.
This doesn’t mean appraisals stop mattering or that every appraisal suddenly becomes more favorable. It means the format and data structure appraisers and lenders use are changing.
For us in New Orleans—with our old houses, additions, converted doubles, accessory spaces, unusual room configurations and properties that have spent 150 years refusing to fit neatly inside anybody’s box—that’s worth understanding.
This is what information is supposed to do. Not scare you into acting and not soothe you into acting. It should make an unknown known enough for you to assess it.
If you want to understand the change rather than merely know that it exists, we broke down how the new appraisal rules could affect New Orleans homebuyers and sellers on a previous post.
Maybe you don’t report enough taxable income to qualify for the thing you want to qualify for. Maybe the online mortgage estimator gave you a number that seems ridiculous. Maybe you’re carrying more high-interest debt than you’d like and are now really, really thinking about that truck purchase.
Or maybe your credit file simply doesn’t look like the financial life you actually live.
Clearly, no sensible person is going to give you a mortgage.
Right?
That’s where self-rejection starts getting expensive.
When somebody considers lending you money to purchase a home, the underlying question is whether you are likely to make good on that obligation. But the tools available to answer that question are changing too.
As of fall 2026, approved Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lenders can use VantageScore 4.0 for eligible loans instead of Classic FICO, while Classic FICO remains available. In other words, even the way the system evaluates credit isn’t as fixed as people tend to assume. See more at FHFA.gov.
That doesn’t mean a new scoring model magically qualifies everyone. It means the answer may be less obvious than you think.
The same is true of financing. There are legitimate, commonly used ways to structure a purchase that most buyers will never have any reason to learn about. You shouldn’t have to become a mortgage expert to discover which one fits the way you earn, save, borrow or think about leverage.
Which brings us right back to our buyers with the $100,000 foundation problem.
They didn’t need us to tell them the house was fine. It wasn’t. They needed a team willing to understand the property, understand them and figure out whether there was a legitimate path between the two.
There was.
The useful question wasn’t Are we the kind of people who can buy this house?
It was What would it take?
Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes it’s yes, with a plan. Sometimes it’s not yet. All three are considerably more useful than a no you gave yourself.
We dug much further into what changing credit-score models could mean for mortgage borrowers and how to stop telling yourself no before anybody else does last week — definitely worth the read.
So What Should You Know Before You Start Looking?
Probably this:
More may be possible than you believe. You may be closer to the thing you want than you think. And figuring that out may require considerably less work from you than you’ve imagined.
That doesn’t mean every house works. It doesn’t mean every financial problem has a clever solution or that every risk is worth taking.
It means you don’t have to solve the whole thing before you’re allowed to ask the question.
Tell us what you want your life to look like. Let us help figure out what it would take to get you there. We can price the risks, find the experts, explore the financing, investigate the weird thing in the inspection report and tell you when the thing going bump in the night actually deserves your attention.
Then you decide.
It may still be too much work. It just may not have to be your work.
Talk to us → coolmurphy.com/contact
Now That We've Gotten A Few Jump Scares Out of the Way...
We promised to take the scaries out of buying a house.
We did not promise to take the scaries out of New Orleans.
Frankly, we wouldn’t want to.
So now that we’ve dealt with rates, appraisals, financing and the various other things lurking under the financial bed, let’s get into the fun stuff: people who have encountered considerably more supernatural consequences of exploring New Orleans real estate.
Those we cannot necessarily prepare you for.
We can, however, hold your hand.
From the Cool Murphy Crypt
🤨 Do Sellers Have to Disclose That a House is Haunted in Louisiana?
Let’s start with one of my favorites: those HAUNTED / NOT HAUNTED signs you sometimes see in front of New Orleans houses.
Spoiler: there is no corresponding haunted checkbox hiding somewhere in the MLS.
And discovering that something unsettling once happened in a house doesn’t necessarily mean a seller or agent was legally obligated to tell you about it. We went much further down that particular rabbit hole in So You Want to Buy a Haunted House?—including what Louisiana actually considers a material fact and one buyer who was considerably more interested in acquiring a benevolent ghost than avoiding one.
🔮 Where is the Séance Room in New Orleans?
I didn’t know we had one.
Uncle Craig did.
So naturally, we went upstairs to investigate.
There is a séance room hiding in one of the French Quarter’s best-known restaurants, complete with the sort of history and atmosphere that makes you wonder how many times you’ve walked right beneath something extraordinary without knowing it was there.
The newest Uncle Craig Unleashed takes you inside.
This is Part One, so consider it your sneak peek. You’ll have to wait for Part Two to get the full scoop.
🪦 What Happens When You Discover Your House has a Haunted Reputation After You're Already Under Contract?
It has happened.
Lorelei found the house. Loved the house. Put the house under contract.
Then she discovered it had a nationally documented haunted reputation.
At that point the question stops being Would you buy a haunted house? and becomes something closer to:
Well. Apparently I did. Now what?
We asked her.
LINK: Royally Haunted
🕯️ Where's the Most Haunted Place in New Orleans?
Good news. It’s probably not your house.
We sat down with the author of New Orleans’ Most Haunted Hotels to talk about the Bourbon Orleans, the stories attached to it and why, in a city with no shortage of contenders, certain buildings seem to collect more than their fair share.
Is it the most haunted place in New Orleans?
You’ll have to decide.
And What If You Prefer Your Halloween Content with More Paws than Poltergeists?
We can help there too.
One of our favorite Halloween traditions involved considerably cuter creatures: Howl-O-Ween, our fundraiser with Take Paws Rescue and Pepp’s Pub.
There were dogs in costumes, a pup-kin patch and a photoshoot to raise money for rescue. And one of the best things to come out of the evening had nothing to do with costumes at all: a little pup named Ernest found his forever home just a few blocks away in the Marigny.
Consider this your treat for making it through appraisals, financing and several possible hauntings.
Celebrated for her next-level creative approach to real estate, Elisa Cool Murphy is the author of Prepped to Sell: What Works Even When the Market Doesn't. She is an award-winning, top-performing real estate broker in New Orleans and the founder and owner of Cool Murphy Real Estate.
Contact Her -
email: cool@coolmurphy.com
Facebook: @homeinneworleans
IG: @coolmurphynola
YouTube: @coolmurphynola
phone: 504-321-3194
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