Our homes are central to everything we do, and given their importance in our lives, it is difficult to make an unemotional home-buying decision. Real estate agents are fully aware of the impact of emotions on their clients and use emotions to help sell a home and to push up the price during negotiations. Agents will advise sellers to turn on the lights of a home, to create a pleasant atmosphere during showing by baking bread or cooking with cinnamon just before the prospective buyers arrive. They also suggest that the sellers play soft background music and put out fresh flowers, all tugging at the heart strings, and eventually the wallets of the buyers. Although you can never completely avoid emotions when you buy a home, there are a simple steps that will help to keep you in a realistic frame of mind.
Checklists are wonderful aids to making a good decision.
Ask your agent for a checklist and bring copies with you when you shop. When you get close to making a decision, look at the home with checklist in hand and check off things that are important to you. When you are looking at a home, turn off the light and walk back into the room to see how the room looks in natural light. A second or third look, even if you are on a tight schedule, may reveal properties about the home that you may not find acceptable, but that you may have missed the first time through. When you negotiate for a home, write down on a paper, separate from your purchase agreement, the top dollar you are willing to pay for the house.