I Like The Number

“I like the number” my seller said, explaining how he set his price $10,000 too high.  Other sellers add in their airfare from across the country, their monthly mortgage payments, what they paid their gardener.  The oddball “cost” items that show up in a house’s price aren’t limited by reason.

The entire approach to price setting is very un—unbusinesslike, unrealistic, and unnecessary.  The sellers are entitled to all they can net out of their house.  No justification is required; what their costs were is irrelevant to the issue of what the market will now pay for their property.

But some sellers actually believe that their costs set the price their property will sell for.  We are, of course, talking about a “normal market” here, not one in which buyers are driving up prices by frantic bidding.

Many people flip their switch from “buy mode” to “sell mode” with no carryover insight into how a buyer of their property will feel, even though they’ve just bought a house---and felt absolutely no interest in the problems and goals of the persons who sold it to them.  Not only do many people compartmentalize their buyer-seller feelings the same day or week, some can do it in the same breath.  With their sellers’ hat on, they have an amazing ability to totally block out the simple facts that govern buyers:

1. Buyers won’t knowingly pay too much.
2. Buyers want to get a good deal.
3. Buyers aren’t interested in paying for sellers’ mistakes.
4. Buyers couldn’t care less how much money the seller needs for an initial investment on the seller’s next house, to start the seller’s new business, or whatever the seller has in mind.
5. Buyers actually check to see what other properties are available, and compare values.

The sellers who block out these universal buyer’s rules aren’t too dense to see the truth; they simply don’t want to.  You’ll generally have little difficulty explaining and getting agreement to, the first four rules.  It’s the fifth that will give you the most trouble because most sellers---even those offering a common, drab house in need of care---think theirs is a unique and highly desirable prize that’s far superior to similar properties.  Tread softly here.  Such sellers sail a dreamboat on a pond of delusion.  It works something like this: “If buyers are shrewd, my dreamboat won’t float.  Therefore, buyers are not smart.  And anyway, I only need one buyer---just one guy smart enough to have the money to buy this house, and too dumb to know it’s overpriced.”