There's a distinct difference between selling a home that you bought solely for the purpose of making a profit and selling the home where you raised your family. In both cases you're looking to exchange property for cash, but the motivations aren't the same.
Understanding these motivations can benefit the buyer as well as the seller.
"Success in negotiation isn't just about the numbers - it's about understanding the power of human connection and the stories we attach to our possessions," said Alice Lee, assistant professor of organizational behavior in the ILR School.
"Negotiations are too often seen as just a back-and-forth of calculations-'Here's my offer, what's yours?'" Lee said. "But I think it's much deeper than that, and understanding the emotional and relational aspects can be really powerful."
Lee is corresponding author of "When Sellers Care About Caretakers: Seller Attachment Shapes Who Gets to the Bargaining Table," published July 4 in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Lee's co-author is Daniel Ames, professor at Columbia Business School.
In four studies, Lee and Ames found that a seller's emotional attachment to an item - as small as a guitar or a piece of jewelry, as large as a family home - influences the "sales funnel," the process through which sellers sort through the field of potential buyers to determine the course of negotiation and, ultimately, the sale. And if a buyer is viewed by an emotionally attached seller as a potential caretaker of that item, that buyer could gain the inside track in negotiation.
Lee said one aim of the research was to challenge conventional wisdom regarding the buyer-seller dynamic.
"A lot of the popular advice on negotiations suggests that buyers should play it cool and refrain from showing how much you want something," she said, "that maybe there's a weakness that could be displayed by showing too much enthusiasm."
The first three studies were surveys involving previous transactions. In the first study, the researchers interviewed a total of 359 people who'd recently sold items such as bicycles and gaming consoles in online marketplaces. The second two studies involved the real estate market: The team interviewed 491 recent U.S. home-sellers, and subsequently 529 real estate agents from across the U.S.
In all three cases, the researchers found support for their hypotheses that seller attachment influences both the search behaviors and the final buyer selection process, in both online marketplace and real estate transactions. For example, sellers who reported higher attachment to their possessions sought more information about potential buyers beyond just the financial terms of their offers, and were more selective in deciding which buyers to engage with. And home sellers with higher emotional attachment assigned greater importance to a prospective buyer's plans for the property.
For the fourth study, Lee and Ames devised an email paradigm and recruited a total of 311 participants. Each was assigned a condition - either "high-attachment" or "low-attachment" - and was to act as the seller of a family cottage they'd inherited. In the high-attachment condition, the cottage was owned by a close relative with whom they'd spent much time in their youth; in the low-attachment condition, they only saw the dwelling, owned by a distant relative, after they'd inherited it.
Each participant was shown an inbox with seven responses to a listing for the cottage; the list price was $90,000. Among the seven was a "caretaker," whose bid of $82,500 was the lowest of the seven. There was also a response that featured the highest bid - $92,000 - but included the fact that they planned to demolish the cottage.
As in the first three studies, high-attachment participants placed greater emphasis on caretaker attributes of the prospective buyers. The "caretaker" email featured the subject line "Our family loves your cute cottage!" and named their family members, including their dog.
What's more, those in the high-attachment condition were 50% more likely to open the "caretaker" message, and more than twice as likely to open it first.
Lee said that for attached sellers, the search process wasn't about total time spent, but about the pivotal moment of finding a buyer who aligned with their priorities.
"The key was, when do you discover that message that you've been looking for?" she said. "And for those that are highly attached to their cottage, they are more likely stop their search after they read a 'caretaker' message."
Lee said one lesson for buyers in this research is to "read the room" when it comes to sellers.
"Try to understand the seller's perspective," she said. "If you're buying from a house-flipper, then a strong financial offer is probably what matters the most. But if you're buying from a family that's lived there for 30 years and has a strong sentimental connection, maybe leaning into your authentic feelings about the home and your intentions to care for it can be a game-changer."
