Clouds in Bonita Springs Don’t Hate The Player Hate The Game

Regardless of whether a home owner was a flipper, a rehabber or just a regular Joe homeowner, some of them take the home sale hard. Understandably, people get emotionally attached to their homes. They’ve raised a family in them or spent some of the best years of their lives in that home. Anyone can understand the attachment and sadness of moving on.

There is another type of homeowner that gets defensive when selling their home. They start looking at the buyer more like an enemy. All the buyer ever did was choose to purchase the house. It isn’t a personal attack, it wasn’t a calculated deception and they didn’t buy the house to “get one up” on them.

There are a lot of people out there who believe that they got ripped off because they didn’t sell their home at precisely the time it was worth the most. That time during the flash of lightening when their home was worth a fortune (on paper) and they woulda, coulda, shoulda sold it.

Face it, the home is for sale because the owner either wants to or needs to sell it. The buyer is someone that needs a home. Lord knows there are enough homes from which to choose. Instead of feeling fortunate that they have found a buyer some sellers agree to sell and then slowly turn both barrels on the buyer.

The sellers become bitter over whatever losses, real or imagined, that they’re suffering and the buyer become the focal point of their anger. There is no way to rationalize it.

Through the years I’ve been involved with transactions where the sellers refused entry for inspections, refused to complete repairs or got cases of amnesia when it came time to leave household items behind. Sure, these items are contractually agreed upon so they can be disputed but often times, it’s a down to the wire discovery.

Sometimes the final walk through for the buyers brings the discovery of missing kitchen cabinet knobs, curtain finials or the lanai set that is suppose to convey with the rest of the furniture. The seller “accidentally” loaded up a little extra to make up for what they feel the buyer is taking from them.

The fact that the economy is crappy and the housing market is in a slump is irrelevant. In the mind of some seller’s it’s all the fault of the buyer.

There probably isn’t a real estate agent that hasn’t replaced something that took a walk that shouldn’t have, just to get the property closed. Most recently I met buyers for a final walk through and had to tell them several items were missing from the home. Since they had invested a considerable amount of time and money to get this far they decided to close. They were the bigger person.

What the seller of this home didn’t realize is that these buyers weren’t stealing from him; they were simply buying a home that he needed to sell. It wasn’t the buyer’s fault that the value of the home went down over the last few years. The seller should have hated the game, not the player.

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Real Life in Bonita Springs is a project by Chris Griffith dedicated to writing useful blog posts for consumers about the Bonita Springs, Florida area.  Find out what it is really like to live in Bonita Springs, Florida by reading about our fair city. You’ll get the latest in local real estate information, Bonita Springs real estate market reports and a little bit of humor.  If you have topic ideas, feel free to request a story about the idea, after all, this site is just for you.

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