Welcome to Overthinking Real Estate

My name is Danielle. From 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., I have the pleasure of working in third-party risk management at a top consulting firm. After that, my life turns into Los Angeles real estate.

When I tell people this, there’s usually a pause while they do the math: does she work in cybersecurity in real estate, or are these two separate jobs? The truth is, I was feeling unfulfilled in one area… so instead of getting a hobby like a normal person, I took on a second career. And ever since, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about why real estate is unlike any other industry. Whether I mean that as a good or bad thing… I’m still deciding.

I went to Tulane and studied economics and information technology, with minors in sociology and management. AKA: I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Do I now? Not fully. But I’m getting closer. What I do know is that once I got a job, my degrees stopped seeming to matter, and now that I keep finding myself with a different point of view than everyone around me, I’m working on understanding why.

Here’s part of it: real estate is stuck in several time periods at once. People are doing business the way they did it in the eighties, the early 2000s, before the crash, after the crash, while everything around the business has changed. And the industry treats itself like its own sealed entity, when a home actually touches everything: money, identity, family, class, taste, technology, security, risk, law, and the picture in everyone’s head of what life is supposed to look like.

That’s the itch this newsletter exists to scratch.

Because how is this the largest purchase most people will ever make and the whole thing runs on agents who aren’t always honest, who look more qualified on social media than in person, and who’ve been “doing this for years” inside a system that no longer works the way it did?

There’s a century of economics, sociology, psychology, and risk theory that explains how people behave around homes. Real estate isn’t irrational. It runs on the same forces as everything else: loss aversion, status, scarcity, social proof, and stories repeated until they sound like facts. Until we believe them. The point isn’t to force ordinary life into real estate analogies. It’s to use the theory to explain the behavior we already have around homes: what people value, what they fear, what they refuse to let go of, and what they call rational after the fact.

A couple heads-ups

Everything here is opinionated, and everything gets a counter. Something I’ve learned in my few years of being an adult: everyone has opinions, and no opinion is right. One of my favorite things is talking with people who disagree with me… not because they’ll change my mind, but because it’s genuinely interesting to hear why. So you will always know three things in these essays: what’s fact, what’s my opinion, and what the other side would say. If I cite something, you’ll know where it came from.

I’m not going to pretend I became an essayist overnight. Here’s the honest process: I have ideas, I talk into my phone, and I hand a pile of ADHD thoughts to Chat, Claude, Perplexity, and whatever else I feel like using, with one instruction… don’t form new ideas, don’t hallucinate, don’t add anything; take my sentences and make them sound like a human without ADHD wrote this. I don’t see the value in making the writing worse just to prove I typed every sentence alone. The thinking is mine. The final piece has enough of my human-in-the-loop fingerprints on it that I’m willing to put my name on it.

Why I started writing this

The more I work in real estate, the more I notice how many enormous decisions are shaped by things nobody actually knows. We call them common knowledge, real estate always goes up, renting is throwing money away, location is everything, but we never ask the follow-ups. Who made this common? When did it become knowledge? Was it true ten years ago, and is it still true today?

Meanwhile, everything I actually found interesting in college keeps showing up at work: why people spend, why they take risks, how social proof works, why there was always that one kid everyone followed for no articulable reason, why trends turn, why people believe things that aren’t true. All of it is in real estate. Every showing, every pricing conversation, every offer.

And then there’s this: agents are trained on a long list of things we can’t say. Some of that list is law, and the law exists for good reason. I have no argument there. But much of it comes from an industry habit of softening difficult truths until they can no longer be avoided. Clients hear what feels reassuring in the moment, and then, when reality arrives, the agent is left delivering bad news that might have been anticipated earlier if the full picture had been discussed honestly from the start.

We are required to represent our clients’ best interests, but the culture of reassurance can sometimes work against that responsibility. The opinions agents are encouraged to keep to themselves are not necessarily wild theories or reckless judgments. Often, they are ordinary observations that happen to be inconvenient.

I have been fortunate to learn from a mentor who has taught me the value of being thoughtful, candid, and deeply protective of the client. My criticism is not of her work or of any one person’s work. It is about the broader industry habits I have begun to notice by viewing real estate through more than one professional lens.

Eventually I started writing my opinions down instead of voicing them when no one asked. That’s how I came up with Overthinking Real Estate.

What to expect

Essays about real estate through econ, sociology, psychology, technology, risk, and whatever else I pick up along the way. Some will challenge advice people repeat without knowing where it came from. Some will examine the machinery behind the transaction. Some will explain why perfectly rational people stop being rational the moment a house is involved.

All of it comes through a particular lens. My day job is to think about everything that could go wrong, that’s literally the deliverable, and I bring that lens whether I want to or not. I think real estate is an amazing business that is decades behind the times. I think people in it throw around “SEO” and “AI” with no idea what either means. And I’ve realized I disagree with a lot of how this industry runs and I have never been someone who shuts up, sits down, and follows things she doesn’t agree with.

Am I looking to change the world here? No. Am I going to quietly do what everyone wants me to do? Also no.

This is always an open conversation… the beauty of knowledge is that you never have enough, and the way I think about real estate has changed night-and-day in a single year. So if you have questions, comments, or a completely different opinion: I would genuinely love to hear it.

… and if you have made it to the end of this article, thank you!! I hope you enjoyed!!

-Danielle