REAL ESTATE TOPICS...How to Strive for Excellence When Selling a Home

By Tori Toth

The word “excellent” means to possess outstanding quality, and isn’t that what we want to promote to buyers—that your client’s home is the best there is on the market?

Too often though, I find a seller’s perception of excellence becomes unknowingly compromised by certain circumstances and rationalizations that have seeped into the way they currently measure their performance. Without knowing it, your habits and attitudes can affect your excellence at home, at work, and in life.

Let’s take selling your home, for example. I recently worked with a client who was sick of her house. She complained about the space and the layout. She stopped cleaning because she just didn’t care about the appearance of her space. This woman didn’t see the value in her home anymore despite asking for over-market value. If a seller doesn’t think of their home as a prized possession, how can they give the buyer their best? It’s impossible! The problem is that’s not how she felt about her home when she first moved in or else, why would she buy it? I needed her to tap into those initial feelings she had about her home in order to get her motivated about the staging upkeep and get her home sold.

It was a challenge to get her to strive for excellence towards something that mentally she had already written off, but then I taught her about the law of excellence I learned from the book “Who Kidnapped Excellence? What Stops Us from Giving and Being Our Best,” written by Harry Paul, John Britt and Ed Jent.

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In this book the authors zero in on five core qualities of excellence that are needed to provide outstanding quality. When a seller is trying to obtain excellence, they need to showcase passion, competency, flexibility, communication, and ownership in order to affect the sale of the home in a positive manner. Let’s go in depth with passion and how a seller can use it to their advantage.

Most people try to start their day off right, but then somehow the daily grind may get to them. With passion, you get to choose your attitude, so why not choose the best one? See life as an opportunity and be willing to go the extra mile. My client, sick of her house, saw her home as routine and ordinary, and blinded herself to the flaws of her home because she no longer wanted to deal with them. She wasn’t looking at her home with fresh eyes, which was hurting the sale of her home.

The authors suggest to “develop a habit of approaching each day with a great attitude. Whatever door you need to go through, do it like it’s the first time you’ve ever been through that door, like you can’t wait to go out and explore,” much like a dog does when let outside. Yes, the dog goes out the same door several times a day, but each time the dog is excited, trembling with anticipation, and can’t wait to get out there and explore.

After rearranging my client’s home and organizing her closets, she looked at her home in a new way. By shaking up her routine, the transformation made her passionate about maintaining the space, which kept the home in better condition for showings and, overall, made her feel more passionate and less sick about the process.

To learn how to incorporate the other four core qualities of excellence when selling a home, read “Feel At Home: Home Staging Secrets for a Quick and Easy Sell.”