Understanding home seller behavior

Flickr photo by deltaMike.

You might recall from last week that a new friend of mine, Danielle LaPorte, wrote a guide to finding your "style statement" -- a two-word phrase that "define(s) the true you."

While LaPorte's style statements describe the subject individual's aesthetic and world view, I couldn't help trying my hand at creating a few homebuyer profiles based on this principle. While a true style statement might be a phrase like "elemental power," I came up with style statements of typical homebuying behavior like "Decent Do-It-Yourselfer" and "Righteous Nitpicker."

With sellers, more than buyers, their selling style is not necessarily their usual, personal style of interacting with the world. We're specifically talking here about their style of thinking about this particular experience and transaction of selling their home.

There is a little mental switch that flicks when one becomes a home seller. All but the very most Zen individuals shift into high alert, and some of the normal internal reality-checking mechanisms seem to deactivate.

When it comes to pricing, preparing and providing access to their homes in the context of trying to get them sold, some sellers behave consistently in a style different from how they normally approach the world.

As with buyers, I'd like to give sellers the benefit of the doubt. I believe that the best seller behavior is motivated out of an earnest belief in the possibility of a win-win. But even the very worst, bizarre or even begrudging-but-smart seller behavior is motivated very rarely by malicious intentions.

Much more often, it's the fear and anxiety involved in wanting or needing to squeeze every cent out of the seller's most financially valuable possession -- and the implications for the seller's future plans and lifestyles of getting (or not getting) top dollar for their home -- that drive the illogical decisions we sometimes see sellers make.

So, let's say there are two different versions of the first style statement word that, together, accurately cover 99 percent of sellers:

• Version A: Abundant -- these are the sellers who operate on the opposite of the scarcity principle, and look to make a win-win deal.
• Version B: Anxious -- these sellers' primary motivator is the concern that they won't get enough, or that they'll come out the underdog of the transaction.

With style statements, the second word expresses the nuance or edge that makes one pattern or profile of behavior different from the others. In my experience, with home sellers this distinctive edge manifests as a spectrum of selling styles. For some sellers, it's a sequence of phases they go through, while others jump straight to one spot and stay there, good or bad.

To my mind, the best parallel for expressing the stops along this spectrum are the coping mechanisms psychologists have observed humans to use in managing stressors (like, say, selling your most financially valuable possession).

Whether their first style statement word would be "abundant" or "anxious," some of the distinctive patterns I've noticed in seller behavior -- the second words of the seller style statements -- include: ...CONTINUED

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