"March was a berserk month," she said. "Today, the price would've been exactly right."
Money wasn't her only regret. The family scaled down with the move and bought a less expensive Potomac house, half the size of their old one.
Shelley and Severin Sorensen stand with thier family in front of their house they bought in Potomac, Md. from left, Hayden, 11, Britton and Bryce, both 10, front, Skylar, 4, and an exchange student from China, Sabrina Liu. At first Shelley was convinced they had made a mistake buying a house half the size of their previous one, but now she is getting used to it.
(Cathy Kapulka - The Washington Post)
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"At first, I felt we had made this gargantuan mistake," Sorensen said. "Oh my gosh, I would think, where is my big, beautiful house?"
Consumer psychologist Tatzel said: "Leaving a house is a real parting. It represents a chapter in your life. When you move, you reassess all of your belongings, you go over the memories that occurred there."
After a couple of months, Sorensen's remorse started to fade, and the family began to enjoy their new home.
"It's cozier," Sorensen said. "We're together in the same room now, instead of spread out all over the big house."
Paying the Price for Selling
Marisa Summers has a different kind of seller's remorse, one that has been widespread during the past few years of galloping price appreciation -- the "I shouldn't have sold at all" regret.
Arthur Blitz, a Bethesda real estate lawyer, said many of his clients have experienced such remorse. "They think they sold cheap, that if they had held on, they could've gotten a lot more," he said. "When a market is going up 17 to 20 percent a year, it's not hard to feel that."
In Summers' case, she had a one-bedroom, two-level condominium on Capitol Hill that she had bought for $86,000 in 1998.
After she and her husband had a baby, though, the condo started to feel small. They sold it in 2001 for $120,000 -- $34,000 more than she had paid three years earlier -- and bought a $165,000 single-family house in Cheverly.
"I'm not sorry we bought the house, although I miss walking to the movies at Union Station," Summers said. "I'm just sorry we sold the condo."
Summers said she has been keeping a close watch on what condos in her old Capitol Hill building have been selling for -- something that's common among remorseful sellers. "I think I could sell it for $200,000 now," she said ruefully.
They sold when they did because they thought it was the only way to come up with cash for their down payment on the house. Summers has since learned that they could have raised the cash by borrowing on the equity they had built up in the condo.
"Even paying a property manager, we could have made a couple hundred dollars a month extra renting the condo out," she said. "It would've been a great thing for our portfolio. And we would've had extra income from renting it. A lot of investors are going in around there and buying up those older homes now."
Marisa and husband Michael still drive around Capitol Hill, looking at the development around their old building and feeling stupid.
"Now we're having another baby, and investing has become even more important for us," she said. "We already had a great piece of property and we sold it."
