Gen Z Couple Excited To Get Keys to New Home—Then They See What’s Inside

When Louren Wilson and her partner Jimmy turned the key to step into their first home, they expected a quiet walk-through of the empty property. But what they got instead was a tail-wagging surprise.

The moment was showcased in a video posted June 27 to Wilson’s TikTok account @lourenwilson1. Wilson, a 24-year-old electrician, captured the unexpected welcome that she and her 25-year-old partner had into their new home in Lindsay, a town in Ontario, Canada. The clip has since racked up over 3.2 million views.

Text overlaid on the footage reads: “When there’s a full a** dog in your new house.” The video shows Wilson unlocking the front door for the first time. Inside, a dog stands behind a baby gate, tail wagging excitedly. A pack of bottles of water and packet of toilet paper are also visible on the floor.

“We literally got the keys two minutes before the video,” Wilson told Newsweek. “I opened the lockbox on the door handle to get the key—we were moving in that day.”

But the dog wasn’t a new housewarming gift—it was an oversight. Wilson said that the previous homeowners had underestimated how much they could fit into their moving van. “The dog was there because the previous owners didn’t have enough space in their moving van for everything so they had to come back, but we were under the impression everything was gone,” Wilson said.

While the situation was resolved quickly, the unexpected presence of a pet left behind—albeit temporarily—offered a humorous contrast to the stress many face trying to purchase homes in today’s competitive housing market in the United States.

A 2024 report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University found that millions of potential homebuyers have been “priced out of the market by elevated home prices and interest rates.” The home price surge was reported in 97 of the top 100 markets, with higher rises in the northeast and Midwest regions, the report found.

Wilson said that all the paperwork had been finalized and the property was legally theirs when they arrived. “We were told we were good to move into the house. We got the deed and we headed over. It was about 6 p.m. when we arrived, and this is us first opening the door,” she added in a follow-up comment in the video post.

Unsure of what to do, the couple contacted their realtor, who in turn reached out to the sellers. Rather than making a scene, Wilson and Jimmy decided to leave and grab dinner nearby. “We called the realtor, he called them [the previous owners] and we [went] to dinner. By 8:30, we got another text saying everything was gone and they had gotten their dog,” Wilson said.

She confirmed the pup had been left alone only for a short period. “The dog was only alone for a few hours and the previous owners got the dog a few hours later while my partner and I were out at dinner killing time,” Wilson told Newsweek.

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