Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Information or Education When it Comes to Serving Buyers or Sellers in Today’s Market?

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As a former elementary school teacher with a passion for literacy and building up the next of generation of leaders, I get a special joy out of working with students.  Recently, I was volunteering in a local elementary school with the goal of supporting a student with her reading comprehension.  One word she was getting hung up on was the word coax.  She just plowed through the word, reading it as co-ax.  When she finished the paragraph we talked about whether there was anything that did not quite sound right and discussed how many people, including myself will be reading one thing but thinking about something else, often having to go back and reread multiple times for various reasons.  Most importantly, I wanted to convey the message that if we don’t know what it means we should stop and figure it out before we go on so we do not lose the meaning of the words or the big idea.  I am sure right now, you are thinking, “Yes, we all know this.”

Have
you ever been guilty of reading something and then getting to the end of the page and realizing that you have no idea what you just read?  Maybe you were thinking about a meeting, a book, a phone call you need to make, or what you were making for dinner that night – or maybe it was just really boring or confusing and you had a hard time focusing.  I wonder how many home buyers feel like they have
read through something and not even really ‘read’ it because it is a whole new
language.  As a newer agent with a
background in education and research, I assure you every field has its own bank
of acronyms and vocabulary and our industry (real estate) is no different. It
is this new language that I found most challenging initially. From short sales,
bank owned, and foreclosures (which most people have some understanding of) to
REO, HUD, HOA, CMA, ARM, CCR, amortization schedules, special assessments,
metes and bounds,  you name it – it can
be confusing.  Most people understand the
adjectives we use to describe the areas… quaint, charming, views – mountain,
waterfront, Puget Sound, and of course the amenities… great schools, safe,
clean communities, friendly library, shops within walking distance, close to public
transit, Amtrak, Kingston Ferries…but these are all easy to know about.  When a buyer or seller is completing a
binding contract how well do we educate them on the contract?  Just like students in a classroom buyers come
to us with varying degrees of background knowledge…


I don’t
want to ramble on and bore you so I will wrap this up for the evening and tie these two anecdotes
together tomorrow!  I hope this was worth a read and some consideration…wait until you see how I was able to laugh at myself later this day!  I could take a lesson from my little pep talk.  I’ll say that much.  


How much information is too much when preparing your clients for the mountain of paperwork and what can be a lengthy process of buying a home, especially in the cases of short sales.

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