Emotion of Selling Your Home

When you are thinking of selling your home – and by ‘home’ I include second/holiday homes/family homes, the old saying ‘home is where the heart is’ can be detrimental to achieving a sale.

Homes are places where we live out our lives, with family and friends, making memories and experiencing chapters of our lives which shape us for the future, so of course emotions are attached to them. The problem is, when we come to sell a home, this emotional attachment often makes it difficult to sell with an unbiased head and clear objectivity. This can unconsciously sabotage your chances of selling.

So, when you are considering putting your property on the market, there are some points to consider and tips for coping with the emotions of a sale, before you even go to market. Equally, if you are already marketing your home, you may recognise some of your own actions/reactions here and may want to have are think about your approach to selling.

1. Recognise that selling your home can be stressful and emotional.

Often (but not always), the length of time you have been in your home can impact on emotional attachment, simply because you will almost certainly have been through more emotional experiences in your home over a longer period of time. Conversely, a home owned even for a short period of time, during which a significant emotional event has occurred in your life, can be equally as stressful to sell.

Acknowledging that the process of selling may prove to be stressful and emotional at the start, will ultimately help you make better decisions throughout the process.

2. Make sure you are really ready to sell.

You may have no choice but to sell, which can be even more difficult emotionally, or you may be making the decision because life has changed and you feel there is a new chapter of your life to move toward. Either way, get as much support as you can from family and friends. All parties selling should be in agreement, otherwise you are already on an emotional back foot. Talking through your reasons for selling can often highlight reasons you really don’t want to, or reasons you really ought to, if you have a choice; or can help you adjust to the positive reasons for selling, if you have no choice.

If you do have a choice about selling and find it hard not to let go of the reasons for staying, or find yourself reluctant to acknowledge and act upon professional advice you have received about presentation of the property, or market price for example, then maybe you really aren’t emotionally ready to commit to a sale yet, so wait until you are.

3. Depersonalising.

Your home is a marketable product, which hopefully and with a little luck, others will want to buy. Without detaching from your home and depersonalising it, it is going to be difficult to view it like that, from a buyer’s perspective. This may will hinder your chance of selling.

Depersonalising your home by creating a neutral décor, removing personal photos, trinkets, pictures and other items to which you are emotionally attached can help you start to think of your home as a ‘property to sell’. Before you do this, it may be beneficial to photograph everything in situ, to create a memory folder of your time in the property, so you have something to look back on.

Have a plan for storage of such items which won’t impact on the presentation of your home to potential buyers.

Once you have reached this point, then it is time to make a conscious decision to react positively to professional advice on market price, to help you achieve a sale.

In addition to that, prepare yourself for viewings. Criticism, even given in a constructive fashion, of your property can come hard, if your emotional attachment is still very strong. Be prepared for this and devise a plan to cope with it. It helps if you stick to the facts of the property when presenting it to potential buyers, rather than relive your own memories as you walk them through the property. E.g. “The garden is 1500m2 and is bordered by the stream, with the local cycle path to the rear…”, as opposed to “The garden is just the perfect size for enjoying a big family barbecue, with the children fishing in the stream and enjoying long bike rides in the summer evenings….”. Such phrasing not only allows you to emotionally distance yourself and remain objective, but also allows potential buyers to visualise their own use of the garden (property), rather than concentrate on your use of it.

Summary:

When all is said and done, don’t forget to go easy on yourself when marketing your property. If emotions surface, it is natural, but try not to let them influence what is essentially a business decision. If a potential buyer doesn’t like your property, for whatever reason, just let it go….there is someone out there who will see it as their future home and as long as you are marketing the property with a conscious, informed business attitude, you will find that buyer!