Here’s how we use emotion to make people act in today’s market.
How can you get the most money for your home? Sellers ask me this quite a bit, but sometimes I’m even asked this by buyers who are looking to move into a new home. To illustrate a point, I want to tell you a story about a cup of mine.
I walked into the kitchen last week and saw a crack down the side of the cup. I wanted to try and salvage it, but when I told my wife, she looked at me like I was crazy. Throw it away, she said, and when I thought about it more, I had to admit we had plenty of other, less dangerous cups.
“Logic makes people think, and emotion makes them act.”
But I wanted to salvage the cup because it came from a client of mine, Rose, who would always serve me water in it when I talked with her. It also reminded me of the cups my grandma used to use. To me, it was a big deal; to my wife, it wasn’t.
Real estate can have similar emotions: emotional sellers, emotional buyers, and even emotional agents. For me, the cup was worth a lot. For my wife, it was worthless. It’s important to remember that logic makes people think, but emotion makes people act. To sell a home for the most money, or buy a home for the least, we’re trying to tap into those emotional buttons.
When we’re buying a home, we’re trying to think of what the seller wants out of the deal and how we can cause them to act on our offer. While selling a home, one way we do this is by setting the price as a strategy, not the destination. We want to price the home so a buyer sees more value in the home and becomes attached to it.
So if you understand that emotion makes people act, you can position yourself to try and get people to act more on your offers or your listing. If you have any more questions about this, give us a call. We love helping people think through their strategy more.
