It’s hard to schedule appointments as a real estate agent. We have clients who will take 5 minutes to see a home, soak it all in, and others who will spend more than an hour looking at the property’s finer details. If you ask any real estate agent who their worst nightmare (or least favorite) clients are to work with, they will tell you it’s the financial ones. Not necessarily people in the financial services industry, but people who crunch numbers and ask incessantly irrelevant questions. The ones who can’t decide unless they can somehow calculate the guarantee of future monetary gain. The clients who need to qualify and quantify everything. The ones who need reams of data to get them over the finish line. All numbers – no heart.
Here’s where our job gets challenging. There is never any certainty. There are no guarantees when it comes to value. The only thing we can guarantee is that there is no constant. The property you buy today will almost definitely be worth less or more when you sell it. More or less. In the thousands of transactions I’ve worked on in my career, less than 1% of them have been a net-sum transaction. A seller either makes or loses. It is our natural instinct to want certainty, but it can be debilitating. Certainty just doesn’t exist.
I’ve said it to every client I’ve represented. “Buying a home is much more of an emotional decision. The decision to buy or not should be made on how the home will make you feel”.
How will it impact your happiness?
How will it affect your “humanness”?
How will it improve your life?
This is your HOME. It is not a stock or a 401K. Its where you live each and every day.
Therefore, the decision should be guided by your heart, with a touch of math.
This week, I got to read Bill Bryson’s book “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” A must-read because it is a refreshing reality and perspective check on our place in the world. I plan on giving it to my future financial clients who are having difficulty making a decision. In summary, Bill says, “If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans, we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.”
Be forever grateful for today. Right now. Be thankful for the people, things, and experiences that make up your every day in your home – your partner, children, pets, plants, favorite chair, bookcase, warm bed. Those are the bricks that build a life and a home – and they can’t be quantified in dollars and they shouldn’t be. A handful of times in my career, someone told me they wish they had not bought the house they loved, but I have more people than I can count telling me about the home they should have purchased. The one they loved, but over-thought and talked themselves out of or missed the opportunity when someone else came in to buy it. And very rarely is there any way money can fix the regret.
Listen, I am not advocating foolish spending. I am only saying that a home is so much more than a financial investment – its where you make your life. Remind your clients of this, and I promise they will be grateful.
Let’s do this.
-Shaun