Talia and Roy are a young couple, thirty-something, two salaried employees with a reasonable income that is nowhere near enough to buy an apartment in Israel. They saved stubbornly for a few years. No inheritance, no parents helping. A sum that was supposed to buy them something, and simply didn't, not here.
They sat across from me, a thin folder of papers on the table between them.
Not many documents. Not yet. They were at the stage where people come to me not to sign something, but to understand whether it is even possible.
“We heard that in Greece it's still possible,” said Talia. “But we have no idea where to start. A new apartment from a developer, or a second-hand apartment?”
I asked them why they were buying at all. Roy answered quickly: “Investment. So we have an asset that works for us.” Talia nodded, but something in her face did not entirely agree.
We started going into details, and here it got complicated, not because I had to explain another category, but because every number I raised opened another question.
I showed them two real properties that I had accompanied clients on in the past year. One - a new apartment in a project under construction in an area that hasn't yet been “discovered,” with a relatively low entry price and significant upside if the forecasts about the area's infrastructure materialize. The other - a second-hand apartment within walking distance of the beach, already rented, with three years of occupancy history that can actually be checked and not only believed on the strength of promises.
Roy lit up at the first. “That's exactly what I read about - buy early, sell when the area develops.”
So I asked him: what happens if the infrastructure they are talking about is postponed by two years? That's not a hypothetical scenario, I have seen it happen. The apartment will still be there, but his money will be locked in an asset that doesn't yield much and hasn't risen in value, while it could have been working elsewhere.
Talia asked about the second, the rented apartment. “So that's the safe choice?”
Not necessarily. I showed her that there is a catch there too: an apartment that is already successfully rented is usually sold at a price that already “prices in” that success. You are not buying an opportunity, you are buying a result that already exists, and paying for it in full. The yield you get from day one will be lower than the historical yield the seller presents, because the price you pay is higher than what he paid.
Roy tried to calculate it in his head. “So which is better?”
I told him I can't answer that without knowing one more thing - how long they are willing to wait without income or with low income, and what happens to them if the worst case occurs. Because this isn't only a question of average yield. It's a question of how much shock they can absorb if the plan doesn't materialize exactly as they expected.
And this is where Talia said the sentence that made me realize they hadn't really talked about it before: “I'm not sure I want an asset I have to worry about. I was thinking more of a place that we also enjoy.”
Roy looked at her. “We didn't talk about that.”
They didn't fight. It wasn't an argument. It was simply the first time both of them heard out loud what the other thinks, without the filter of “what makes sense.”
We kept talking for another hour. We didn't reach a formula. Because there is no formula; there is a weighing of how many years they are willing to wait, how much money they are willing to see “dormant,” how much they trust regional development forecasts that no one can truly guarantee, and how important it is to them that the apartment be not only an asset but also a place.
At the end of the conversation Talia said: “We need to think at home.”
It wasn't an excuse. It was honest. I left them a sheet with the data of the two properties, and said I'd be here when they decided.
They didn't come back with a decision. Not that week, not the month after.
I think about them sometimes. Not because something went wrong, but because they did the most uncomfortable thing there is, discovered they were not in sync, and didn't run from it. Many couples sign for a property before they have this conversation. They had it first.
There is no single right answer between a new and a second-hand apartment. There are questions to ask before you choose, not only “how much will it cost,” but how long you are willing to wait, how much shock you can absorb if something doesn't go according to plan, and what the two people buying together actually want from this property. Sometimes the most important answer only emerges when you try to answer it together.
Stories are based on real situations, with identifying details changed. Not legal advice.
Translated from the Hebrew original. עברית