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Homebuyers who regret their purchase, a new approach to data center development, and another attempt to combat homelessness. From the wild and wooly world of real estate, here are our Hits and Misses for the week of April 21-25.

Miss: Post-Purchase Depression. A survey released this week by Guardian Service found nearly one-third of first-time homebuyers experienced buyer’s remorse after acquiring their first property, with 9% believing they should never have made the purchase. The survey found 38% of first-time homebuyers felt pressured to make a homebuying decision quickly, and those who felt pressured were nearly three times more likely to experience buyer’s remorse. The top regrets were underestimating repair costs (22%), choosing the wrong home size (19%) and feeling they had rushed into the decision (15%). Oh well, it seems that the American Dream is not a one-size-fits-all concept.

Hit: Data Centers Done Correctly. Also this week, a quartet of data center industry companies have partnered to launch the Net Zero Data Center Alliance, focused on the development and creation of zero-emission facilities with integrated bio-farm technology and sustainable construction solutions. The alliance founders – Innovo Profitable Net Zero, ESS, Arco Design/Build, and Corpus Christi Regional Economic Development Corporation – are prioritizing the environmental impact of data centers while meeting the growing demand for computing power, particularly for AI and machine learning workloads. Dan Shaffer, president at ESS, said it best when he observed, “This alliance demonstrates that environmental responsibility and operational excellence can work together synergistically.”

Miss: Here We Go Again. Three Democratic California lawmakers – Sen. Alex Padilla and Reps. Ted Lieu and Salud Carbajal – have reintroduced the Housing for All Act to finance federal and local programs designed to address the homelessness crisis that worsened during the Biden administration. The bill’s key provisions call for increased investments in federal initiatives including the National Housing Trust Fund, the HOME Investment Partnerships program, the Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly Program, the Section 811 Supportive Housing for People with Disabilities program, Housing Choice Vouchers, Project-Based Rental Assistance and Continuums of Care. Uh, has anyone noticed that these existing programs made absolutely no dent in the mitigating the homelessness crisis? Maybe it is time for new and better ideas, rather than making the same mistakes twice?

Miss: Who Will Buy? During the first quarter of this year, 44.4% of home sale transactions involved seller concessions to buyers, according to data from Redfin. That’s up from 39.3% in the first quarter of 2024 and shy of the 45.1% record set in the first quarter of 2023. Redfin defined concessions as money from the sellers that went toward repairs, closing costs and/or mortgage-rate buydowns – it did not include situations in which the seller lowered the list price of their home or lowered the price due to a negotiation with a buyer. For homeowners who waited too long to put their properties on the market, this data cannot be comforting – especially when we learned that existing home sales were down by nearly 6% in March.

Hit and Miss: There was good news and bad news for San Francisco’s real estate market this week. The good news involved JPMorgan Chase leasing an additional 65,000 square feet at its regional headquarters as 560 Mission Street, the 31-story tower also known as the JPMorgan Chase Building. This will expand its total occupancy within the building to 280,000 square feet. The bad news involved Saks Fifth Avenue announcing that it will permanently shut the doors of its Union Square location on May 10, joining a long list of retail brands that have closed their San Francisco locations due to rising crime and a deteriorating quality of life. While the JPMorgan Chase news is a major thumbs up for the city, the Saks departure is a reminder that San Francisco still has problems in desperate need of being solved.

Miss: A Long-Haul (and Long-Hole) Dilemma. For real estate professionals who are uncommonly pessimistic, we have wonderfully bad news for you! A study published in the journal Nature Geoscience is not good news. The study determined that ancient bedrock beneath the North American continent is slowly dripping away, which has resulted in a funnel-like structure under the Midwest that impacts most of the US and Canada. While scientists insist this doesn’t mean North America will soon disappear down a gigantic geological drain, it nonetheless offers a reminder that real estate – either above ground or below – is in a constant state of evolution.

Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].