Potential Homebuyer Refuses To Buy A ‘Perfect’ House For Sale Due To A Political Flag Outside — ‘I Won’t Give My Money To This Person’
It might sound extreme, but many others said they would do the same thing.
fstop123 / Getty Images Signature / Canva Pro We all know that today's real estate market is bonkers. With so much competition and prices so high, many real estate agents tell buyers that "if you sleep on it, you won't sleep in it" — meaning if you find a house you like, you better pounce, or it'll be gone.
But for one Idaho real estate agent, her buyer had other priorities. After finding the perfect home, the buyer bailed on the sale because of one seemingly small detail the realtor said is actually very common.
The buyer refused to buy a house with a political flag outside despite it being their dream house.
Ashley Kaiser is an Idaho-based realtor, and as she shared in a TikTok video, she had a rather surprising encounter with one of her clients recently.
"So we pull up to the house, and there is a huge political flag out front," Kaiser said, and immediately, she braced for how this might impact the showing. "I already know my clients, so I already know this might be an issue," she said.
It intensified from there. "We get out of the car anyways to go unlock the house, and we noticed that just the husband is coming up to us," Kaiser said. "And [my client] says, 'We're done here.'"
Despite how long the client had been struggling to find the right house, they were adamant about the owner's political views.
Kaiser had been working with this client for a long time as he struggled to find a house that filled all his needs. "I said, 'Are you sure? This house checks off a lot of the boxes on your list.'"
Kaiser reiterated to the client, "'We've been looking for a long time, and we haven't been able to find something quite like this that works for you,'" but it made no difference — the client was adamant.
"He said, 'I'm done. I don't care if this house checks off every one of the boxes on my list. I would not give my money to this person, period,'" Kaiser said. "So we got in our car and moved on."
Many people said they would have done the same thing, and Kaiser used it as a warning to people who assume everyone agrees with their views.
"You might not think that anybody else disagrees with your political stance," Kaiser said, but about 50% of people do. Our national elections are typically won by razor-thin margins, after all, and this led Kaiser to recommend that home sellers not make their political affiliations known.
On one hand, this all seems a bit overboard. Not buying your dream house because you're concerned about giving money to a home seller you don't agree with is kind of silly when nearly every corporation from whom we buy nearly everything is regularly donating heaps of money to politicians that the majority, even if it's a slim one, of Americans disagree with.
But several commenters pointed out that this goes far beyond just the views of the seller "giving them the ick," as one TikTok commenter put it. Things like political flags can also be an indicator of the general tone of the neighborhood, too.
"We didn’t buy a house because of all the political flags on the house next door," one commenter wrote. "I knew I couldn’t deal with that for the next however many years." And if those flags include enthusiasm for things like guns, for example, it can give some an eerie feeling of being downright unsafe.
I've experienced this personally. In 2020, I got lost on a California hiking trail and had to bushwhack my way to a cul-de-sac for help. Seeing that every house was festooned with confrontational political flags, including gun-related ones, was nerve-wracking enough. But when a woman came out of her house and agreed to help me find my way if, and only if, I'd disclose who I planned to vote for, my blood ran cold.
It's a sad sign of the times that our politics have become so extreme that showing support for a certain candidate can make a neighborhood feel unlivable — or downright unsafe. But given how quickly our political divisions seem to go off the rails these days, it's hard to blame anyone for walking away.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.