The Bay Area Real Estate Journal — Local Real Estate Intelligence for Bay Area Homeowners, Buyers, Sellers and Investors

A video I posted just days ago has now passed 5 million views. I have been making videos for a long time, and not one of them has ever done this. It still does not feel real.

The setup was simple. I am sitting in my car with a client walking through their wish list. Two stories. A lot of windows. Five bedrooms. A pool. A lake view. As they describe the dream, an AI image of that exact house sits behind me. Then the numbers come out. No down payment, so they need 100 percent financing. Two thousand dollars a month in income. A budget of $150,000. And with every sentence, the house behind me shrinks. The mansion becomes a normal house, then a small house, and by the end it is a trailer.

Here is what the video was not. It was not me laughing at someone for wanting more. I wrote it in the caption and I will write it again here. My job is not to laugh at the dream or to crush it. My job is to listen, understand what matters most, and build a roadmap to get you there. Where we start is usually not where we finish. Your dream home may not be your first home. But you have to start somewhere.

What the comments were really saying

I expected people to laugh at the joke. Instead, 3,000 comments turned into a conversation about how expensive housing has become and how far out of reach the dream now feels. People were not mocking the client. They were the client. The message I keep getting is that affordability has hit a breaking point, and I will not pretend the market is cheap. It is not. Our own June market report showed East Bay homes selling in a median of 13 days with inventory down more than 20 percent from a year earlier. Tight and expensive is the real backdrop to that video.

But I have had a lot of conversations with clients in their 60s and 70s. When they bought their first home for fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, it did not feel easy to them either. It felt like a stretch they were not sure they could make. Almost everyone who has ever bought a home reached a moment where they had to push further than felt comfortable.

Push yourself, do not choke yourself

That is the line I have used with clients for years. Push yourself, do not choke yourself. A home is not only an expense. It is an investment in your income and in your family’s future. Building real wealth through real estate has always been a real option for ordinary people, and the earliest lesson I give anyone is this: do not wait to buy real estate. Buy real estate and wait.

I have sat with people who were certain ownership was impossible, who had paid rent for years, and who could have owned a long time ago. If they had started when they first wondered about it, they would be sitting on years of equity now instead of years of rent receipts.

Start somewhere

So this is my message to anyone who saw the video and felt that gap between the dream and the budget. There is real power in simply getting information. Book a consultation. Find out what your actual options are, not what you assume they are. Maybe it starts with a condo or a one-bedroom. Maybe the bigger house comes later. Everyone starts in a different place, and that is fine.

Have a goal and hold onto it, because if you do not have a goal you will never reach it. Dream big. We will figure out the path together. You just have to start somewhere.

Watch it on TikTok if the player does not load.

Omar Murillo is a broker and co-founder of Everhome Real Estate, serving Fremont, the Tri-City area, and the greater East Bay since 1998. To talk through your own path to ownership, reach him at 510-552-6111. California DRE #01244077.