Real People
By Jim Palmer Jr.

In a typical real estate transaction, buyers and sellers are shielded from actual contact with each other by their agents who think they are doing the right thing to insulate their clients from the opposing party.  While this practice usually makes sense, it takes much of the human element away from a transaction.  Sometimes difficulties occur because of that lack of human connection. After all, it is real people with real needs who have families with emotions that cause a transaction to occur.  When the brokers totally take that human element away and rely simply on the contract verbiage, empathy and understanding may take a back seat.

What I mean might be explained by this example; In a recent rural property transaction, buyer and seller (in their naivety) agreed to meet each other at the property, unbeknownst to the brokers, after the initial showing and offer.  The buyers really connected with the seller and vise versa.  This connection influenced the seller to make sure this buyer was able to purchase their property and verbal concessions were made to accommodate a certain loan type that was not a good fit for this particular property since there were some systemic issues that would need to be fixed.  Buyer was willing to make all of the arrangements including paying for materials and doing the labor required in order to upgrade the home to meet certain standards for that particular loan type, which was really the only loan the buyers could possibly qualify for.  The listing broker was appalled by the situation since they felt the risk to seller was too great for liability reasons, but empathy and understanding of real people and real life situations (rather than just seeing a name on a purchase agreement) overcame the negative issues that may have been highlighted and argued about by the brokers.  In this instance, those issues were easily eliminated instead of becoming a huge hurdle to haggle over.

In another example a “love letter” that accompanied an offer from a young family became the main reason the seller took their offer instead of other offers, simply because of the human connection that happened when the sellers saw photos of the family that included their cute pet and read the compelling emotional reasons the buyers gave for purchasing the home.  This seller realized that it was real people buying real property!