Adversaries

It’s no big secret that Real Estate is a competitive business. I recently heard that there are roughly 550 homes selling per month in San Mateo county…and there are something like 3300 Realtors. Needless to say, competition is keen and as a result it’s not uncommon for alot of us to become adversaries, particularly when competing for business! If I discover that I’m competing against certain agents, whether it be in a multiple offer scenario representing buyers or for a seller’s listing, the competition takes on a sort of Dodgers-Giants quality to me. I simply can’t lose to them! In fact I won’t lose to them!

Of course, I delude myself because sometimes I win and sometimes I don’t. Often times, when I’ve sold a home and we’re inside of an escrow, it can feel adversarial with the agent on the other side of the transaction. Most of the time things work out just fine, we do our jobs and everybody ends up happy in the end.

Having said all that, it’s very, very common for both buyers and sellers to feel adversarial with each other to some degree too. Everyone has some degree of suspicion toward each other and often that becomes distrust. Buyers can become suspicious of the sellers inspections, sellers worry about the buyer’s inspection contingency, sellers (and listing agents) worry about the validity of the buyer’s pre-approval letter, buyer’s get suspicious about why the sellers are moving in the first place, sellers feel like the buyers are trying to take advantage of them when they write an offer under their asking price and buyer’s feel like the sellers are greedy for asking that much in the first place! And the world goes round and round.

Recently I had this experience: The seller’s loan amount is slightly higher than our asking price on her 2 bedroom condo. Neither she nor her family want her to lose the property to foreclosure and so she’ll get help financially to bring the necessary cash to closing so that she won’t have to endure a short sale. She’s experienced alot of emotional suffering about this situation. A buyer comes along who makes an offer $20,000 under the asking price and I suggest that she take it. She understandably wants to counter offer $10,000 higher so she won’t have to ask for as much help from her family. The buyer thinks about it overnight and gets feedback from friends and family…who advise her that her first offer was too high and she should go $30,000 under the original asking price. She came back with a counter offer $10,000 under her original offer. Her sphere of influence convinced her that the market for this type of property was still going down and that her original offer was too high…even though it was lower than the last comparable sale. Honestly, given the input that she got her thinking was perfectly understandable too. We couldn’t put it together and the buyer walked away. I’ll bet both parties here felt like the other was greedy…and I really don’t think either side was.

Here’s the bottom line….buying and selling a home is a very emotional event in almost everyone’s life. It’s easy and human for us all to misunderstand each other during this process…and become adversarial. It’s a mistake when we do.