Here is a number no one prints on the listing: 73% of first-time home buyers have regrets about their purchase. Not minor second-guessing — regret. It comes from a 2025 Clever Real Estate survey of nearly a thousand recent buyers, and once you see what they regret, a pattern appears that should change how you approach the biggest purchase of your life. The regret is not random. It is the predictable result of buying without two specific numbers in hand.
The regret has a shape
When the survey asked recent buyers how things had gone since they closed, the answers clustered in a way that is hard to unsee. Among first-time buyers, 42% felt they overpaid for their home. 51% said they ended up in over their heads financially. 31% took on additional debt just to maintain their lifestyle. 27% have struggled to make a mortgage payment on time. More than half had to make major lifestyle changes to afford the place they bought.
And the quietest, most damning finding of all: when buyers were asked whether their overall financial situation was better or worse since buying, more of them said worse (23%) than better (19%). The single largest purchase most people ever make left more of them behind than ahead.
More buyers said their finances got worse after buying than better. The biggest purchase of your life should not be the thing that sets you back.
First-timers get hit roughly twice as hard — and that is the tell
The most useful column in the whole survey is the comparison between first-time and repeat buyers. On nearly every measure of pain, first-timers fared about twice as badly. In over their heads: 51% versus 25%. Took on extra debt: 31% versus 15%. Struggled to pay the mortgage: 27% versus 9% — three times the rate.
It is tempting to chalk that up to first-timers having less money. But that is not the whole story, and probably not most of it. Repeat buyers are not richer by definition. What they have is a second set of eyes that the first time around they did not: they have already learned, the expensive way, what a listing leaves out, how far an asking price can drift from value, and what a mortgage actually costs once the real bills arrive.
In other words, the gap between first-time and repeat buyers is an information gap wearing the costume of experience. Repeat buyers paid tuition in regret. They are simply spending what they learned.
Almost all of it comes down to two numbers
Look back at what buyers actually regret and nearly every item collapses into two questions they could not answer with confidence before they signed.
The first is what the home is actually worth. Overpaying, feeling you overpaid, the offer you wish you had not made — those all trace to one missing number: an independent read of value, anchored to what comparable homes have really sold for, rather than the asking price or a search-page estimate built to pull clicks. The asking price is a negotiating position. A loose online estimate is a starting point. Neither is the value, and buying as if they were is exactly how 42% end up feeling they paid too much.
The second is what the home will actually cost you each month. Being in over your head, taking on debt, struggling with payments — those trace to the gap between the tidy monthly figure on the listing and the true monthly cost once insurance, the commute, maintenance, tax drift, and the rest arrive. Two homes at the same price can cost hundreds of dollars a month apart. If no one shows you that before you fall in love, the surprise shows up in your bank account instead.
Why this is fixable
Here is the encouraging part. Buyer regret is not a personality flaw or a market you cannot beat. It is a data problem, and data problems have answers. The repeat buyers who fared better were not luckier. They walked in knowing roughly what a home was worth and what it would really cost — and they were willing to walk away when the numbers did not work.
That knowledge does not have to take a first purchase to acquire. It can be handed to you up front: a straight, buyer-side read on what a specific home is worth, the true monthly cost with the hidden line items included, and a plan for what to offer and where to stop. Not advice from someone paid on the sale closing. An independent read that answers only to you.
This is the entire reason ZETTLD exists. The survey is not a warning to scare you off buying — buying a home is still one of the best decisions most people make. It is a map of exactly where the regret comes from, so you can route around it.
How to land in the other 27%
You do not need to become a real-estate expert. You need three things in hand before you make an offer, not after.
Know what it is worth, independently — not the asking price, not a generic estimate. Know what it will truly cost you each month, with the costs the listing skips. And decide, in advance and in writing, the number past which you walk away. Buyers who do those three things are the ones who, a year later, say their finances got better instead of worse.
The 73% did not regret buying a home. They regretted buying it without the numbers. That part is entirely within your control.
