Ego and Real Estate

A healthy ego is important in completing a real estate transaction. Your ego is your sense of yourself. You have to know who you really are and how you want others to see you. In a perfect world, people see you as you really are. An unhealthy ego is either an overblown ego, where you are the most important person in the world and everybody has to kowtow to your needs, or a underdeveloped ego, where you undervalue who you are, what you want, and what you need because you have a poor sense of yourself. This interferes with your ability to get what you should get because you give away too much.

In the film Funny Lady, Fanny Bryce, played by Barbra Streisand, gets a plum offer from Flo Ziegfeld. She says she doesn't deserve it because she hasn't suffered enough. Yet in other places in the story she oversteps her bounds by telling Ziegfeld (a god in his industry at the time) what she won't accept. He would throw her out except she was very popular. She has an ego that's sometimes overblown, sometimes underdeveloped.

This is no different than any other business transaction. Each side has to have a healthy sense of themselves, what they want, what they're property is worth, what they want, what they're willing to accept, what they want for the other person, and so-on.

There is no justifiable place in a real estate transaction for an unhealthy ego, just as there is not justifiable place for an unhealthy ego any other business transaction. A overblown ego causes trouble because the buyer or seller's emotion spills over the top and interferes with fashioning a deal that everybody can live with.

An overblown ego infects the transaction and undermines the interest of the offending party or parties. The professional becomes personal and that spells at best a rough ride for the negotiations or downright ugly scenes. This should not be a zero-sum game where whenever one side gains something, the other side loses something. It should be a win/win situation for both sides.

There is a place for emotion. Emotion should support you by informing your intellect. When you have an unhealthy ego, emotion gets in the way of your ability to make rational decisions and act in your own best interest.

You have to remember that buying a house is a business transaction, not a pissing contest.

That doesn't mean that everybody is rational. Real estate horror stories abound.

Sure you're going to react emotionally. You're looking for something that has to meet several needs at once. First off, the new house will be a home that will help you have a satisfying and comfortable life.

Second, it has to be a sound financial investment. It needs to support your life, not be one which requires you to devote your life to supporting your home.

Third, there's a reputational component. Having a house in a given area says things about you to other people. If you want to be know for being rich, you want to live where other rich people live.

Trouble comes in when you want people to see you as rich, but you aren't rich, yet you overbuy, pay too much, take on too much debt, and spend your days working to make that mortgage payment when a better investment in a less tony neighborhood would have worked better. That's why you have to figure out who you are, what you want, what you're willing to give up, and what you won't.

Like I said, a healthy ego is necessary in completing a real estate transaction.

I'm trying to create a more informed real estate customer. Is this working?

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