6 Ways to Prepare Your Buyer for their Home Inspection

Its during the inspection period that many newer agents lose their client and their transaction.

You have invested several evenings and weekends showing your client homes.

Finally, they found one they loved and you worked hard to negotiate and paper a deal with the sellers agent.

Have you ever considered that your clients go through a number of emotional waves?

When they are out shopping with you, their mood will normally be light.

They will get very excited once you tell them their offer has been accepted. Afterward however, they will go into a self-doubt mode and you need to be ready for that.

Their mood will start to lift again as the day for home inspection arrives.

However, if you don’t manage your clients’ expectations and reactions well, before, during and after the inspection you risk losing control and they may spiral into a cycle of doubt and worry that will result in them cancelling the deal.

So, what should you do?

1. Lower Their Expectations

Explain how thorough the inspection will be and tell them to expect a long list of deficiencies and items requiring attention. Set them up to expect the worst. Make it clear that most ‘issues’ come with solutions.

2. Emphasize All The Good Things

Normally the inspection will confirm that at least 80 percent of the items in the home are in good workable condition. Keep your client focused on those things.

You must spend time highlighting the excellent features and the wonderful opportunity that acquiring the home of their choice represents. Encourage them to stay in a state of gratitude.

3. Isolate The Negative

With rare exceptions are the negative items the inspector finds terminal.

If clients start to inflate these items in their minds and if the agent fails to quickly explore solutions the deal is in jeopardy.

Most often the inspector is flagging items like grading, furnaces, electrical, roofing, windows foundation, or even sewer pipes for future attention. Rarely are these items not in adequate working order. They may just need attention eventually.

4. Chunk Them Down

If items are urgent, explore the option of a financial remedy with the seller.

If these items are not urgent, then make sure you revisit their home search journey and remind how and why they settled on this particular home. Do they really want to go through this all over again?

If you did a good job of telling the buyer to expect negative news, it won’t come as too much a shock.

5. Investigate and Manage

If you need to offer to find solutions and costs. It’s best to get the inspection done several days before the condition removal deadline so that you have enough time to manage this.

6. Ask for a Decision

If you managed to balance the tightrope of tension between the positive and negative emotions that your client has been feeling, you should arrive at a point where your client agrees to remove the inspection condition.

Rarely in my experience does a well-briefed and well-prepared buyer client back out.

If this happens to you more than once, take a look at your client management skills.

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