Selling Your Home - The Business & the Emotional Rollercoaster

Ever sold your home ?

Doing so requires putting a piece of yourself out there for all to see, inspect and judge. Buyers look at the quality, design and execution of the house as a piece of meat. While emotions can and do get involved, buyers often repeat the real estate mantra (location, location, location) to themselves quietly so as not to get over-awed by your personal choice of colours, sofa, or flooring choice.

It's a game of distraction and decoys, as houses can get staged so that they look like an "ideal-home" one might view in a magazine or a TV set. Indeed we have baskets of green apples for show, a vase of lemons and quite specifically arranged towels. Garbage cans are hidden away, the way clocks are absent in casinos - lest we be reminded of the real world around us. These props are supposed to foster in our buyer a feeling of how excellent their own life will be should they live in your house.

The improvements made to get the defined result of a high price drive out a curious response in the owner - rarely does a house retain its 100% clean, staged look in our everyday lives - no laundry to be done, no dishes to be cleaned and an expectation that some movie star will round the next corner. It's enough to make the seller want to stay - to fall in love with their home all over again. Uttered frequently is the "we should have done this before" statement, though clearly there was never time, desire or thought to do so. The work involved in maintaining this staged state is high however. Any real house-work has to be done clandestinely, just in case someone comes by on short notice. So the beauty of what you have is stress-filled - just like anything in life I suppose.

The seller can't get emotional, while hoping the buyer does to put price secondary to desire, and the buyer shouldn't get emotional, and instead needs to see a house's flaws to keep the price low. In many way this parallels any other business transaction and all comes back to whatever rules the day - the head, or the heart.

PS - Wanna buy a house ?