Liz and Bill Spear of RE/MAX Elite wrote an interesting blog post on Active Rain yesterday about the perils of discovering that your young home buyers are relying on “dear old Dad” to act as their advisor and coach on their home buying process. Here’s an excerpt from their post:
There are few things that strike more apprehension into our day than finding out that someone’s family member is now involved in the home buying decision making process! Dad isn’t the buyer, but BOY can he throw a wrench into the decision making process!
Dad isn’t an agent and never has been, and probably wouldn’t even BEGIN to know how to run true comparables, but his pricing opinion carries far more weight than any agent! Doesn’t matter that Dad last bought a house in 1979!
He’s also not an inspector, but his “You couldn’t pay me to live here” quote will override a clean bill of health home inspection report every time! Because you know that one time….
This post got me to thinking about how the role of other family members is often underestimated or overlooked by busy Agents working on a deal. In some cases like the one described above, dad can kill the deal. In other cases, dad or grandpa or great uncle Jimmy are providing the MONEY for your lovely young couple to buy the home.
This is one of the reasons we encourage agents to gather information about ALL the family members living in the home, or potentially having some sort of influence on the transaction, and to enter that information in their IXACT Contact real estate CRM. Especially in larger cities with large immigrant or ethnic populations, family dynamics can be very different from our husband/wife North American norm. In fact, in some areas, multi-generational families are the norm, and knowing who’s who in the home can be critical to success.
To view the full post by Liz and Bill click here.