What's worse than selling...buying !

As you may have gathered, we recently sold our home. As that particular fact would have made us homeless in a while, we found ourselves plunged head-first in the house-buyer role. That means going to open houses, seemingly endless tours through other people's lives and a frequent sense of regret that we didn't act fast enough as nice place after nice place was snapped up around us.

In a sense, I wish I'd delayed wring my previous post until after I had gone through this experience. A couple observations I might offer:

• It's hard being a buyer
• Sellers rarely adopt the buyer perspective, and instead are caught up in what their own world is about
• While buyers actually set the sale price, a seller can be very difficult to move away from preconceived notions of value
• With a finite supply, the invisible market forces have areal impact on buyer behavior
  

We made a few offers, and one was finally accepted. Most were 'not enough' though we know in a few cases that we were offering fair price for what we saw.

A few common themes emerged in this exercise to what I see in business everyday. Sellers weren't adopting the buying perspective; Sellers had a concept of the value of goods that they offered, and were unable or unwilling to match that to the buyers concept; when a deal was offered and rejected, there was a blind belief that there might always to more from another party around the corner.

This last item is of particular interest, and I always think of it as the herd effect. When we see good times - we assume they'll last forever. We let greed dominate our intelligence and always look for just a little more. It's like we park our thinking ability. I suppose it makes stock markets function and real estate too, but it does seem a little off.

In the end, we purchased a lovely new home, and one that we'll be very happy in. We didn't purchase a few other homes though, and have left sellers probably wondering what happened. In short - they happened. I'd bet they don't see it that way though. I wish them luck finding another buyer whose expectations coincidentally match their own.