How to Help Clients Through Tough Decisions

These days, there are so many choices for everything. Just looking at the options for eggs at a grocery store can lead someone to think that no matter what decision they make, they’re wrong. With so many choices for every purchase, it’s easy to see how deciding on the biggest purchase a client will make for potentially their entire life could lead to “analysis paralysis” … or simply indecisiveness. As this  New York Times article sums it up, it is one of the most difficult decisions that anyone makes in their life - and not an easy one to “define” the best way to go about it, either.

As an agent, it’s not your job to make the decision for your clients, but it is your job to help guide them in a way that makes the decision process easier. Here are a ways to help you, help your clients:

Narrow Goals & Options

Before even beginning to look at houses, it’s important to have your clients narrow down wants and goals with buying a home to the most important data points. This can be location, price/budget, home condition, home specifications, etc. Then, just as important, have your clients rank the importance of each criteria. This helps with the later anxieties that will come with situations like finding the perfect home layout in a non-ideal location, or the right price and location without the ideal number of bedrooms. With those priorities figured out ahead of time, hopefully it’s not as agonizing of a decision at each crossroad.

In addition, when deciding on the most important goals, allow those to be guidelines of which homes are even looked at. Decisions are easier with fewer options - so seeing houses outside of the predetermined guidelines will just make things harder in the end.

Note: This way of making decisions is the premise of the famous “decision psychologist’s” book, “Paradox of Choice”, and TED Talk. For a more detailed deep dive and more steps, check out his work.

Paying Attention to Clients Mindset

As weird as it is, we all know that home buying is just as much about the “feel” someone gets in the home as the actual specs, location and condition of a home. While those things are extremely important too, (and should really be teased out ahead of time as stated in our first point), a clients’ gut feeling can guide the decision in a big way. After all, you want the client to be genuinely happy and excited about a home. 

There are certain behaviors and feelings to look for with your clients that could mean they’re truly excited about a house or not. For example, if you find a client just poking their head into a bathroom versus examining the bathroom countertops up close and stepping into the shower - you know the level of interest (even if it’s not obvious to them). Does a client immediately start picturing where furniture could go? Talk about when they could get back in to see it as soon as you walk? Pay attention to these cues and relay them back to your clients.

For more hints like these, check out “the balance’s” amazing article on “Knowing Whether or Not a House is Right for You”.

Reminder: “It won’t be perfect”

It’s helpful to constantly remind yourself and your clients that there is no such thing as the perfect house. It can be close to it, but not perfect. Searching for perfection will only wind up with an extremely long, frustrating and disappointing process. 

With no perfect house then, what is considered close enough? The 80/10/10 Rule is about as close as some experts say you can get. If a house is 80% of what a client is looking for, 10% of things that they can change, and 10% of things the client can live with - then that sounds like a keeper and about as close to “realistic perfect” as can be.

Be an Educator

While it can sometimes feel defeating that you can’t make a decision for your client, you can help them immeasurably by simply being the best educator you can be to them. As their agent, you can promise them that while the decision is on them, you can be their go-to resource for any and all information they need - which at least helps remove that burden.

To do this, try and have independent sources for everything ahead of time and be one step ahead of the game with information. You don’t want your clients to have to worry about the trustworthiness of your information on top of all the other navigating factors in the process.