I talked to a seller the other day who just didn't want to sell his house. He figured he'd price it high, so no one would make an offer. When a buyer came through, and said "This is the one!", he said he wanted to shout "NO! It's not for sale!". It was an emotional wrench for him to sell, but health reasons had made the move inevitable.
There are a lot of reasons why sellers sell when they don't want to -- health, death in the family, money problems -- and sometimes even the seller isn't cognizant of the emotional tug-of-war going on internally. I've seen it in sellers of all ages, but particularly in the elderly, and especially if they've been in the house for decades upon decades. It may be the first home that the couple bought after getting married. Fifty, sixty years in a home is a long time to put down roots.
Many buyers can't imagine that kind of attachment to a place. Most of the buyers I work with haven't been alive 50 years, much less lived in the same place for that long.
Signs of seller reluctance? An insistence on a too-high price, along with a refusal to negotiate any terms. Foot-dragging on packing up the belongings. And just because a house is empty doesn't mean that the seller has mentally moved on. There may still be a strong attachment to overcome. Sometimes, it's important to let the seller just sit in the empty house and say goodbye.
Sometimes, when it's an estate sale, it's the children who have trouble letting go. They remember every scrape and every adventure. Today the very smell of wood chips can send me back to my childhood home -- and summer evenings sitting on top of the pile of mulch with friends, catching fireflies and whittling pieces of wood down to nothing. It's a good thing I'm not involved in selling the house I grew up in, because I might find it hard to be objective, even after all these years.
And the funny thing is, you don't even know you can't let go until it's time to do so. You think you're being so grown up and dispassionate -- until that last time you turn the key.
So don't be too impatient with reluctant sellers. They're just having trouble saying "goodbye".
(C) Susan Pruden. | 
RSS Blog Feed
) --Susan