As I attempt to refrain from the usual innuendo jokes about size...very tough to do, by the way, I will let you know about some new research where size is at issue. The size of your home, that is. For those of us living in urban centers, like San Francisco, it's unlikely we have too much space. Right? As both a salesperson and a consumer, I know that what we say we want is not necessarily what we really want. We list things we want (i.e. number of bedrooms, square footage, etc) based on rational thought but often make our decisions from the gut (do I feel at home here, etc). From a recent Inman News Article, the writer Katherine Salant, describes recent economic research about happiness as related to home buying. Will a bigger home make me happier? She writes, "In the past, economists assumed that an individual's choices were always guided by rational self-interest. Today they recognize that human foibles, biases and our hunter-gatherer origins can often be the critical factors that affect an individual's choices....University of Chicago economists Luis Rayo and Nobel laureate Gary Becker have carried this current approach one step further and used the contents of their "economic tool box" to predict which choices make people happy." In a nutshell, they feel it much more than size that makes us happy. It is convenience, location, ease of ownership, pride in own's home, etc that fulfill our American dreams. Instead of that killer view that will impress one's friends, maybe what you really want is to be able to walk to the cafe or corner store without strapping on your hiking boots. It's up to you to determine what is important to you. Just try to heed the instinct as much as the cerebral.
