Emotional vs Logical House Decisions

I’m often reminded of the enormous significance emotion plays in the process of buying and selling homes in the Wilmington area.  In fact, real estate marketing, sales and activity places constant emphasis on igniting an emotional response in purchasers, while at the same time keeping sellers grounded in logic and reality.  Warmth, smell, color, presentation, street-appeal are just some of the emotional elements that are involved with the sales process.

We’re taught our words, videos and photographs should “sell the sizzle, not the sausage”, and I’m always a fan of highlighting benefits for consumers rather than listing off a bullet points of "features" that are common to most any house.

Sure, that property may have four bedrooms and two bathrooms, but nowadays most properties do, so encouraging a hot-button response takes more than a brief set of bullet points.  

I’ve also found an emotional purchase doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but the purchaser – and sometimes it really doesn’t seem to make sense to anyone else!  I've seen families buy things that are completely different to what they "said they wanted", actually this happens more times than not.

Logic, unfortunately, gets thrown out the window with buyers and sellers and the personal "need to win" competitive emotion keeps people from buying or selling every single day.  So many times I want to say to a buyer or seller "do you want to buy/sell your home... or learn a lesson?"

So it’s fair to say emotion will always play a part in the world of real estate, but the other big player that REALTORS and/or other advocates should create realistic expectations on is the LOGIC of the situation to get their client to the finish line of whatever their goal is.

Great REALTORS are often great communicators that can instill logical expectations and decision points with their clients, even at the risk up upsetting them.  Afterall, our job as REALTORS is not to win a popularity contest but to truly advocate for our clients.