Real Estate

I'm about to be stepping into the real estate market so just curious, if you can jump on a Time Machine and talk to yourself before you bought (or rented) a home, what would you have told yourself? What would you have done differently? What should you have looked out for?

I'm not that deep in the market but at face value... my current takeaway from what I'm seeing is "Everything always sucks more than it'd seem at first glance, you won't get away with everything you hoped for, and that's ok."