What gets lost when finding real estate becomes very efficient
I was working with buyers looking for a condominium when one particular property came up.
They had already seen it online. It didn’t appear to fit what they were looking for, and they weren’t particularly interested in seeing it.
I understood why.
Based on what we knew about the property and what they were seeking, I was nearly ready to eliminate it myself.
There was only one problem.
I knew the building.
I thought highly of it, and something about dismissing the property without seeing it gave me pause. Not because I thought the buyers were wrong about what they wanted. Their reasoning made sense. Mine was nearly the same.
I simply knew the building well enough to think the property deserved twenty minutes.
“Let’s just go see it. It’s a great building.”
So we did.
They bought it.
The efficiency of knowing what you want
Technology has made it possible to understand an extraordinary amount about a property before ever walking through the door.
That is mostly a very good thing.
The quality of information available to buyers has changed dramatically. A sophisticated buyer can now study a property in considerable detail, understand how it relates to other possibilities and make perfectly reasonable decisions about what deserves further consideration.
I use the same information every day.
But efficiency has an interesting side effect.
The more precisely a search is defined, the more confidently something outside that definition can be dismissed.
Usually, that’s useful.
Occasionally, it eliminates the answer.
What doesn’t fit neatly
The interesting thing about that transaction wasn’t that the buyers changed their minds.
It was that their original judgment had been entirely reasonable.
The condominium did not appear to fit particularly well. Nothing about the information available online suggested that it needed to be reconsidered. Had I not known the building, I might easily have agreed that there was little reason to see it.
But properties—particularly more distinctive ones—are not always the sum of their individual characteristics.
Suitability can be harder to isolate.
A floor plan can be understood intellectually and still feel different once you move through it. A view can be documented accurately without conveying its relationship to the rooms around it. Scale, light and privacy are not absent from good photography; they simply become more legible when experienced together.
That distinction becomes increasingly important as properties become less interchangeable.
A screen can communicate an enormous amount about a property.
It cannot occupy it for you.
What familiarity changes
Over time, familiarity with a market begins to operate differently.
You stop knowing a building simply as an address or a collection of past sales. You develop a sense of its character—how it feels to arrive, how the residences relate to their surroundings, what distinguishes it from buildings that may appear similar from a distance.
The same familiarity develops with streets, neighborhoods and individual properties.
That knowledge doesn’t produce certainty. If anything, experience teaches you to be careful about certainty.
I didn’t know those buyers would like the condominium.
I wasn’t trying to persuade them that the criteria we had been using were somehow wrong. And I certainly didn’t know they would buy it.
My judgment was much narrower than that.
I knew the building, and I thought the whole of the property might matter more than the reasons it appeared not to fit.
It was worth seeing.
Information and experience
There is a temptation, when enough information is available, to believe that the information and the thing itself have become almost interchangeable.
Real estate resists that.
A property can be represented exceptionally well online. The photography can be accurate, the plans detailed, the presentation complete. None of that changes the fact that a residence is ultimately an environment rather than a collection of attributes.
You don’t experience it one criterion at a time.
You experience the whole thing at once.
That is why a property can satisfy nearly everything someone thought they wanted and still leave them unmoved. It is also why an apparent mismatch can occasionally make complete sense once the front door opens.
This isn’t an argument against criteria. They bring discipline to a search and prevent preference from becoming vague.
But there is a difference between using criteria to narrow possibilities and allowing them to become a substitute for judgment.
The distinction is small until it isn’t.
Twenty minutes
I sometimes think about how easily we could have skipped that showing.
Nothing dramatic would have happened. The buyers would have continued their search. Another group of properties would have appeared. We would have kept looking.
Instead, we spent twenty minutes seeing something that didn’t make complete sense on the screen.
In person, it did.
The condominium didn’t fit the search particularly well.
It fit the buyers.
There is a difference.
