Let’s look carefully at several characteristics of home sellers which, for the most part, are universal.
All of these can be utilized for a buyer’s benefit:
- To a seller, their home is the most special home in the world. After all, they bought it, have been paying for it with their hard-earned money, have personalized it to their extraordinary taste, have raised kids and pets inside its walls, fallen in (and sometimes out of) love while owning their home, and have spent countless hours, weekends and holidays tending to, living in, maintaining and improving their home. They would love to believe, and usually do, that their home is worth $20,000 more than comparable homes in their neighborhood, if not more.
- Sellers’ want to get the best deal. There are two basic reasons for this: money and pride.
The first is easy enough. More money is better than less. With more money, the seller can buy more replacement home. How this works may surprise you. Not only can the seller buy $1,000 more replacement home for each $1,000 netted from the sale; due to the leveraging that financing provides, each $1,000 additional cash downpayment on their replacement home may enable the sellers to finance many thousands more in the replacement home.
Pride is also not too complicated to understand. No one wants to sell for less than a better deal than everyone else. Neighborhood pride, you know.
- A seller’s “best deal” is measured in total dollars. Most sellers ignore the economic value of contract terms and conditions. Sometime they even ignore the economic cost of contract concessions, such as seller paid transfer costs, lender fees, points or the value of negotiated inclusions or exclusions (e.g., appliances). So long as the total contract price is attractive, many sellers will not balk at these items.
- Sellers (and many buyers) just want to get the sale over with. Selling a home is not a picnic. For some seller’s it is more like a trip to a haunted house. When an offer finally arrives, there is a hesitancy to “mark it up” or counteroffer, so as not to disturb the buyer’s high emotional state of interest in the property. Using “your” contract form gives you a big advantage when sellers have this reluctance. Many times even big concessions are accepted rather than trying to re-write the contract and frighten the buyer in the direction of another property.
