I know it’s a cliche, but the phrase, “You’re not selling a house; you’re selling a dream” is a personal motto of mine and never is this more true than when convincing someone to buy a house based on a hobby of theirs.
When preparing to move house, every man and every woman has a “dream room”. This is a dream that is rarely realized because it’s rarely practical, but if you can give them that dream then you get them on the side of the sale.
In most cases anyway. I’ve learned that women tend to be much more practical, especially if there are kids involved. They might have a dream of owning a pool or a quiet room, but if it comes at the expense of practicality or cost, they’ll happy abandon it. Men, on the other hand, will throw practicality out of the window to realize that dream, and that’s why it’s always best to find out what they want and then find a way of giving it to them.
Experience
To give you an idea of what I mean, I recently spoke with a real estate agent who works in the UK. He was helping a young couple to buy their first house. They had just come into a lot of money, mainly through the man’s work, and they wanted to upscale from a small rental apartment to a large house complete with mortgage and responsibility.
He noted that the woman was in control completely, but that she always sought her partner's advice. He failed to get enthusiastic about anything and merely agreed to what she wanted. But as excited as she got, when that excitement wasn’t matched, which it never was, she soon changed her mind.
In passing, the agent then found out that the man had always wanted to own a snooker table. This may sound like a small and seemingly insignificant thing, but in the UK, where the houses are much smaller and the rooms barely big enough to accommodate this, it was an impossibility.
With this knowledge the agent managed to sell them a house with a double garage, base purely on the knowledge that it was one of the few places that could accommodate a table. She was happy that he was happy, she played off his excitement, and in doing so they both ignored that the rest of the house had nothing they wanted.
I have had similar experiences myself. I sold a small city apartment to a man who lived alone and wanted to move to a rural area, seemingly so he could avoid people. But he had a passion for e sports and after I told him there was a major eSport game played professionally just down the street, he was won over.
Why This Works
Simply put, it works because we see a house as something practical and necessary. It’s something we need, something we get and something we build our life from. It’s rarely part of our dream, but the minute it becomes part of that dream then it changes completely.
Most of us would happily abandon all of the things we look for in a home just because it was near a stadium of a team we loved, because it had rooms big enough to accommodate things we’d always wanted, because it had a swimming pool, or even because there was a famous next door neighbor. I once sold a property to an aspiring hair stylist simply because the previous owner had setup a home salon and agreed to make it part of the deal.
That’s not quite what people mean when they refer to “Selling the dream”, but it’s what it has always meant to me. And as someone who once bought a house that didn’t fit my requirements just because it had access to super-fast internet (this was a few years ago) and enough basement space to build a dream home studio, I have no moral issues selling these dreams.
