Well, this wasn't on my Bingo card
- Danielle Hughes
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
What buying a house with a friend taught me about trust in business
What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken? Today I’m sharing mine and the hope that this risk will really pay off.
It all started at a book club
Throughout my adult life I’ve been a member of a couple of book clubs. I love to read. And I love to eat good food and drink wine while talking about what I read. Especially if I didn’t like the book.
My first book club was almost more about the food and drink than the books. Actually both book clubs were that. And probably all book clubs.
But what’s great about a book club is people are always inviting friends to join and you never know who you might meet.
Eight years ago I met someone I’m now buying a house with.
Can friends buy a house together?
Turns out they can. But getting here was certainly not obvious or easy.
We first visited Kennebunk in 2020. Rachel had a co-worker who generously lent us her condo (who does that? this woman is a saint). We've come back almost every summer since. Neither of us were ever the sort of people who wanted to visit the same place because there's so much to explore in the world, but we both fell in love with Maine.
In 2024 we were sitting at the pool and the weather was overcast. I happened to be reading Tourist and Town, the local newspaper, which I affectionately call the Town Tattler. (There’s no reason for this moniker other than it sounds like a local paper.)
Anyway, like all good vacationers, I turned to the Real Estate section. I said to Rachel, "do you want to go look at some houses?" A pure lark.
One of those listings was for the development we’re now buying in. We visited one of the resale homes and loved it. We befriended the realtor and seriously considered purchasing it, but in the end, being friends, we knew that we needed to get legal and financial protections in place. Because there’s risk and then there’s risk.
When we came back last summer, I said, 'why don't we visit the sales office and instead of buying resale, maybe we can build our own?'
Turns out they had a few models left. We found a model we liked, put down a deposit and today we’ll finally close on our cottage!
Now, this journey has hardly been easy. Buying a home with a friend, not a romantic partner and not someone you share finances with, is scary. But the funny thing is that where we thought there might be conflict, there wasn’t.
This purchase has forced us to compromise and commiserate. Let’s just say the builders are, from what most people tell me, universally unprofessional and incompetent. How businesses run this way boggles my mind.
And of course purchasing a house that we don’t plan to live in, while having to pay rent in NYC is terrifying. (I’ll gladly share the link once it’s listed if you have ever wanted to visit Southern Maine. It’s gorgeous!)
But like any risk, if you don’t take a chance there’s no reward. Our friendship has gotten deeper and our trust has become unshakeable. This isn’t something we could have undertaken when we first met, or even five years later. It took time to forge a relationship that allowed for something as monumental as this.
But the result is something we created together and that we get to share with people who hopefully will appreciate all the effort we took to make this home a place people want to spend time in.
You gotta be real
Trust doesn’t happen overnight. But it definitely can’t happen if you aren’t real and vulnerable with the people around you.
Over my years in business, and on this planet, I’ve been so grateful to build friendships that withstand the test of time because the foundation was honesty and authenticity. Not everything is meant to last and not every interaction is meant to develop into a relationship or connection, but you certainly can’t connect if you never take the risk of showing someone else who you are.
Want a quick win?
Not a creative professional but looking for a quick win to showcase some authenticity and start building those connections you need for advancement, clients or customers? I’ve got a few options that can get you started immediately.
Can taking a personal risk actually help build your professional brand?
Absolutely — and it might be the most underrated brand-building move there is. When you share the real stuff — the scary decisions, the messy middles, the moments you weren't sure it would work out — you give people something to connect to. That's the foundation of a genuine personality brand: not a polished highlight reel, but a real human being worth trusting.
Why does authenticity matter more than professionalism when building relationships?
Because "professional" is a costume almost everyone is wearing, and people can tell. Authenticity is what cuts through. When you drop the business persona and show people who you actually are — your values, your voice, your weird sense of humor — you stop blending in and start attracting exactly the right people. That's not unprofessional. That's your personality brand doing its job.
How does being vulnerable actually help you in business?
Turns out, letting people see the real you — the risks you've taken, the messes you've navigated — is exactly what builds the kind of trust that turns contacts into clients and colleagues into collaborators.
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