I recently read a little quote that said "indecision is the graveyard of good intentions" which I thought was fairly profound. In real estate we often find ourselves getting fairly irate about clients who fence-sit and can't make up their minds, but when so many of us are guilty of it ourselves, do we really have any right?
Having worked in real estate for as long as I have, I've encountered many people who entered the industry to try it out, or take it for a test drive, but no matter what you call it, these people are fence sitting.
If you think about everyday purchase decisions even, we test drive a car, or try out products we think will better us somehow and even if they prove to be exactly what we're after, we then spend time "thinking" about actually purchasing it, or wondering if the price will lower so we can better justify it to ourselves. So when it comes to real estate, why do all these fence sitters get so upset when their clients try to do the same?
If you think about it, many real estate offers come in at less than the asking price, even if the property is priced right, and within the buyer's budget. This is the exact same concept as described above, and yet when it happens in this situation, we don't understand it. As frustrating as it is, when a buyer is trying to get a seller to move on price, it's exactly what we do ourselves when we go from store to store trying to find a better deal on a high involvement purchase decision such as a new laptop. We need to consider or own fence-sitting before we tell our clients to consider theirs!
Ideally when we find a perfect item, whether it be a computer, a car, or a home, at a price that is within the range we were willing to pay, we'd just jump on it. But until we're all prepared to practice what we preach, when it comes to fence sitting, it's a difficult scenario to tell our buyers to do what I say, not what I do.