Buyers are looking for love. They embark on a househunt hoping for the romantic ideal -- love at first sight. They want to step across the threshold and feel immediately, "I am home." They want the house to embrace them. They want a house that makes them feel safe and secure, warm and happy, completed and fulfilled. They want a home.
Buyers are hoping to find their soulmate, so to speak, in residential real estate.
Sometimes this epiphany actually happens. The bond forms and joy is upon the land! Other times, not. The buyer is disappointed and dissatisfied. None of the houses is the right house. There is no bonding. What is the problem?
It may be that the dream house doesn't exist, at least not in this place and time. The Floridian relocating to Kansas, for example, may long for an ocean view. More commonly, the soulmate house for this buyer does exist, but only at a price point $100,000 higher than he or she can afford. Or -- disaster! -- the one perfect house was available, the buyer saw it and fell in love with it, but lost it to an earlier contract or a higher bidder. Then that lost house lives on ever after, held in memory like a first love from high school, bathed in a rosy glow of perfection that never was. No house that comes after can hope to match the one that got away.
If the perfect match does not appear, eventually the buyer will grudgingly "settle." The agent's hard work goes unappreciated, because he or she failed to produce the longed-for match of hearth and heart.
Realtors aren't selling houses. In very real sense, they're matchmakers. The choice of a home is an emotional one. Ask a buyer why a house didn't work when it had everything they wanted, and they can't explain. It's not the head that decides by adding up points of congruence with the wish-list. It's the heart that decides, for reasons of its own.
Comments(0)