Do You Care Who Buys Your House?

Opinion

6 minute read

April 21, 2011

Or do you just want the most money?

Let me rephrase – if you get the most money, do you still care who lives there after you?

Every purchase or sale is emotional on some level, and many sellers want to know who is going to pick up where they left off…

I was viewing a luxury condo in the downtown core last week, priced at $1.6 Million, and the listing agent wanted to make something very clear…

He said that the seller insisted that the buyer “understand the space.”  The seller wanted the buyer to know what his vision was for the space and how he used it.

All I could think to myself was, “What an arrogant ass.”

Once this seller signs on the dotted line and then packs his bags, how the space is used has nothing to do with him.

It doesn’t matter if the new buyer wants to run a crack house out of the space – a crack house that ONLY sells to children – it need not concern the previous owner.

The seller of this property was very well off, as evidenced by the $1.6 Million price tag, and wanted to “hand pick” his “successor.”

Again – barf.

In the end, he lucked out since there were several offers on the property, and the highest offer was submitted by somebody that he met, liked, and felt “understood” the space and would “appreciate” it as intended.

Not everybody has this luxury, and not everybody should.

Many, if not most sellers, couldn’t possibly care less who ends up with the space after they’re done with it, or what they use it for.

But perhaps that’s because “most” owners aren’t in their properties very long.

Divide “properties” into two categories: houses and condos, and you’ll find that there is a huge discrepancy between the lengths of ownership.

Most condo owners aren’t in their spaces for longer than three years, and I would figure most of these people don’t care who buys the space from them.

When the real estate market was uber-hot during points in 2007 and again in 2009, Realtors would try tricks such as bringing a photo of their buyers to show to the sellers along with the offer.

While I may have done this once myself, I’ve yet to find a seller who says, “Wow,I love the neckerchief that the dude in the photo is wearing!  Let’s sell him our house even though his offer is $25,000 less than the highest!”

Sure – some people do care who ends up with the property, but not at a price.

Last year, a good friend of mine was selling his downtown condo and it was a very unique space!

We’d had a lot of good times in that condo, and we were both sad to see it go.

We received multiple offers on the property, and one of the offers was from a new Realtor who my seller and I both remembered from high school.  This guy was a total clown, and we couldn’t take him seriously.

He came to present the offer wearing jeans and basketball shoes, and we just laughed.  The best part was – his buyer was yet another clown we remembered from high school!  Talk about a two-for-one sale!

I said to my friend, “My God, I hope he doesn’t end up with your condo,” and my friend replied, “Honestly, I couldn’t care less, so long as his client is willing to pay the most.”

I was shocked!

My friend was so cold and calculated!  He had no emotional attachment to the condo, and the the thought of the two deadbeats we went to high school with partying on his terrace didn’t bother him in the slightest!

I’m not going to lie – it wasn’t my condo but it certainly bothered me!

But my friend said, “I really don’t care.  I had four amazing years in that condo, and that building may be on this earth longer than I will.  But I’m not going to lose any sleep thinking about who is doing what in the place that I used to live.”

Maybe it helps if you’re moving onwards and upwards.  If you ditch your starter-home and move into a mansion, maybe you don’t care as much?

When I was twelve-years-old, we sold our modest family home and moved into a much larger home a few blocks away.

I seemed to be the only one in my family who wasn’t excited for the “big” move.

My friends and even my teacher at school were all so very interested in our big new home, but I longed for my 7 x 8 foot bedroom with the carpet that smelled like cheese.  What pained me the most was the thought of some other kid (who I could likely beat up…) sleeping in my bedroom and throwing lit bottle rockets out my window!  So I peeled back sections of my baseball-wallpaper and wrote “Dave Fleming’s ghost lives here FOREVER,” in hopes that whichever child inhabited my former bedroom would somehow convince his parents to sell the house back to us!

We went back and “visited” the old house a few months after we closed on our new one, and my Mom found me laying like a starfish on the floor of my old bedroom.  She said, “Alright, that’s it, we’re leaving!”  And we did.

It seemed like we lived in that house forever, but it was only twelve years.  And the family that bought it from us is still there!  It’s been almost twenty years for them, making that house more theirs than it ever was ours.

But in my mind, I always thought of it as “our” house and they just lived in it.  Is that strange?

When we moved into our new house, the previous owners were ever-so-kind!

They left us a five-page, hand-written note that thanked us for taking over where they left off, and they even gave us a five-dollar-bill to pay the paperboy.  It was all a moot point, since the construction crew showed up the next day and tore the guts out of that house for the next five months…

Not everybody is as emotional as I was…..when I was a kid, I mean.

I have a friend who has lived in a dozen different places in the last fifteen years.  He’s a bit older, and he’s moved through as many jobs as he has phases of life, but he’s planted a flag in every neighbourhood in this city!  He is as unemotional with respect to a “home” as people come.

But in my line of work, I constantly see my sellers sizing up the would-be buyers to determine if they’re the “right” people for their home.  And my buyers are always looking at the sellers like, “Is that going to be us in five years?”

Every set of buyers says, “Those sellers look like jerks.  They’re so smug.  I hope we never become like them.”

And yet most sellers smile, look at the buyers and say, “They look nice!”

Maybe that’s just a function of the market that we’re in.  It always seems like the sellers have the upper hand and thus the buyers are a little bitter and judge them; warranted or not.

Of course every seller in this city laughs all the way to the bank, so of course they like the buyers!

But could these lasting impressions ever get in the way of a potential deal?

In actual fact, I find it’s not the buyers but rather the buyers’ agents that can get in the way!

I’ve seen sellers base their decisions on the distaste for annoying agents many, many times.

You might have eight offers on a property and say, “Let’s send these two couples back – but not these people – their agent was a total dick.”  I’ve seen it before, and hey – what can I do?  I have to do as my clients tell me!

At the end of the day, real estate is an asset like any other.

If you’re selling your old Nintendo on Ebay, do you really care whether or not the new user is going to play Excite Bike without using the cheat codes from Game Genie?

I understand when people give away a cute puppy and say, “I hope she’s going to a good home,” but unfortunately, we just don’t have that luxury with real estate.

The new buyer of your home could knock it down to the ground, or the new buyer of your condo (or the one next door to you…) could be a girl who grows 80 marijuana plants in a fully ventilated and well-lit bedroom and has the cops raid her condo only to let her off with a slap on the wrist.

YOU NEVER KNOW! 🙂

So when it comes time to sell your property, just assume the absolute worst.  Assume that some jerk that looks like this will be buying your place:

And anything less, is a pleasant surprise!

Written By David Fleming

David Fleming is the author of Toronto Realty Blog, founded in 2007. He combined his passion for writing and real estate to create a space for honest information and two-way communication in a complex and dynamic market. David is a licensed Broker and the Broker of Record for Bosley – Toronto Realty Group

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3 Comments

  1. dave

    at 8:23 am

    What??? How did you get my picture??

  2. Potato

    at 4:54 pm

    I don’t know, a lot of it sounds like eccentricities, but if I was good friends with the neighbours, I’d try to pick buyers who’d be quiet, clean, etc. for their sake… but as you say, there’s a price limit to that consideration.

  3. Joe Q.

    at 1:26 pm

    I heard a story from my own RE agent about sellers who picked the second- (or maybe third?) highest bid in a multiple-offer situation because they had met and really liked the buyers. It wasn’t an ego thing — the sellers were downsizing empty-nest seniors and the buyers were a young family looking for their first SFH.

    As for childhood home sentimentality, sometimes parents have a way of nipping it in the bud. My parents moved to my childhood home in Scarborough when I was 2 and stayed there until I was 23. The year after I moved away for university, my sister took over my old bedroom and her former bedroom was turned into a guest room. There was nothing of “me” in the house anymore. That was pretty much that. 🙂

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