Analyzing your feelings early on will make the selling process smoother, but even if you spent some grieving time before you put your house on the market, it's still normal to feel some pangs of sadness during the closing. While it's easy to tell yourself that you're overreacting, overcoming remorse isn't a simple process. Selling a house causes a wave of different emotions. There's excitement in a fresh start, but there can also be sadness leaving a home you've loved for years.
There is anticipation as offers arrive, but there can be stress if the transaction encounters an obstacle. They take pride in the work you've done over the years, but you might be offended when a buyer doesn't see the value. More than a third of Americans admit to crying during the process of selling their home, and not for sentimental reasons. According to recent data from the real estate website Zillow, the stress of selling left 36% of adults crying, and 20% crying five times or more.
That could make the place where you grew up, or brought your children home from the hospital, feel invaluable and difficult to separate, even though it's ultimately just a physical thing with a price tag. Then there's the fact that you can feel attached to your home because of all the time and work you put into improvements. This client, a professional teacher, chose to homeschool her three children in a house she set up to make them feel like a classroom. In addition, 61% of sellers were also in the process of buying a new home at the same time, according to the data, adding more pressure and financial complexity to the process.
They are comfortable with the status quo and are threatened by change and the unknown, which makes losing or separating from what they have particularly difficult. While brokers may be dispassionate about the sale of a property, some sellers have been known to sob through their real estate closures, not realizing how the enormous display of emotion could look to buyers. Applying this division of church and state to the sale of the home can absorb some of the excitement of the process. Vredevoogd Combs said, because vendors might not be as careful to move out of the house as they would if it had been a place of happy memories.
When the process is extremely stressful if the home doesn't sell, or the bids fall far short of what sellers feel the home is worth trusting, a broker can help, the lady said. While the new place is exciting, the stress of moving, combined with the sadness of having to leave behind the house where they formed their family, they have been using. Low inventory and high buyer demand mean it can take time to find your next home, and this makes many sellers wonder where they will go if their current home sells quickly. Her father died in 1996 and her mother in 2001, but she and her sisters waited six years to sell the house because it meant a lot to them.
Selling your home can be bittersweet if you're upgrading to a larger home, moving closer to your family, or taking on a promising new job, you're moving to something better, even when you lose a beloved space. This is because, although buying or selling a house is, at its basic level, an exchange of money for a product, it is also a company full of hopes and dreams and, at least in the case of the seller, of memories and experiences rooted in that physical space.
