House Wants vs. House Needs: What is Non-Negotiable?

Real estate check list for home buyers

For every prospective buyer who dreams of owning a Garrison Colonial with a farmer’s porch, there’s another who’d rather have a sleek city condominium right near the train station.

The sooner your client defines what she does and does not want in a house, the quicker you sell it to her. As you get to know your customer, you will easily determine the things that are a “must-have” vs. a “like-to-have.”

The homebuyer’s checklist is an essential tool that will help your customers determine the specific features they want in a house. The checklist includes everything from neighborhood to number of bedrooms.

First-time homeowners may not have a checklist yet. Helping your customers define what they want in a house is part of relationship building. For some homeowners, this process may be a bit challenging. Sometimes it’s easier to start with what they don’t want in a house.

Price range is usually the first consideration. But other factors come into play such as the real estate marketplace and how quickly they need to move.

As a Realtor®, you have to learn the fine art of negotiation. Sometimes, the negotiating you do is with your own customers. Do they really need to have 4 acres of land, or can they be happy with just one?

Negotiation means opening up your customers up to possibilities and asking them to let go of things that they want so that they can end up with what they need.

Case in point: a young couple came to their Realtor® with their homebuyer’s checklist. It included price range, desired towns, and number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Also on the list was “large yard and a back porch.”

The Realtor® knew that this couple wanted to go from owning a condominium in the city to owning a small house in the suburbs. The couple had no children. The husband wanted to be relatively near the commuter train since he worked downtown.

First up? Expand the number of towns on their list. Then, since they didn’t have children and neither one had a green thumb, the real estate agent convinced them that they didn’t really need a big back yard.

In the end, her customers bought a 2-bedroom Cape-style house with a small backyard and no porch in a town that they had not considered. But it was only about one mile from the commuter train.

Another example is of the couple who told their Realtor® that they loved to entertain. The wife was an excellent cook and wanted a Chef’s-style kitchen.

Their real estate agent showed them a number of houses in their price range, but there was one house that fit all their other criteria but one: It had a small kitchen.

Most customers would have stopped dead in their tracks, said “no,” and walked straight out of the house.

In fact, they almost did.

But this real estate agent knew that there was a possibility of a big kitchen, if they knocked down a wall and opened up the whole space. They could create the kitchen of their dreams. The Realtor® even went on email them images of newly renovated kitchens.

By sparking their imagination, she was able to peak her customers’ interest and get them to reconsider the house. She even went so far as to give them some names of reputable contractors who had experience remodeling kitchens.

She opened her customer up to the possibility that this house—the house that had every other feature but a large kitchen—just could be their dream house.

And so they moved in.