Selling Your San Jose Home? Your Emotions Are About to Cost You

There’s something working against you when you sell your home. And it’s not the market. It’s not the buyers. And it’s not your agent. It’s you

specifically. It’s your own brain. And it’s built to cost you money without you ever noticing. Now, my name is Kip and I’m going to tell you what most agents

won’t. And some of it you might not like. Now, I’ve made a lot of videos about overpricing your home, but today I

want to show you why it actually happens. because every seller who does it swears they’re being reasonable. And

that’s exactly the problem. It doesn’t feel like emotion from the inside. It feels like math. So, let me ask you,

have you ever been completely convinced you were being logical only to realize later your emotions had quietly taken

over? Of course, we’ve all done it. So, here’s what you have to understand first. When you overpric your home,

you’re not being greedy. You’re not being difficult.

[snorts]

Your brain is literally trying to protect you. It’s doing exactly what it evolved to do. The problem is what it

evolved to do can cost you a lot of money. So no pricing lecture today. I want to get into the actual wiring of

your brain because it’s fascinating and once you can see what your brain is doing, you can hopefully catch it. And

trust me, that changes everything about how your home sale goes. So let me show you one of the most famous experiments

in psychology. The year is 1990. Three researchers, one of them named Daniel Canaman who later won the Nobel Prize

for this kind of work. Now they run an experiment with coffee mugs of all things and they take a room full of people. Half of them get a handed a mug,

just an ordinary coffee mug, and the other half gets nothing. Then they ask the people holding the mug, what would

you sell it for? and they asked the people without one, what would you pay to buy it? Now, these are the same mugs

randomly handed out. Nobody got to pick theirs. Nothing special. Nobody had it more than four minutes. And you’d think

the buy price and the sell price would be about the same, right? Well, they weren’t. The people who owned a mug

wanted about double what the buyers were willing to pay. Double for a mug they’d only held for four minutes. Now, that’s

called the endowment effect. The second something is yours, your brain automatically reprices it. Not because

it’s worth more, just because it’s yours. So, sit with that for a second.

If your brain doubles the value of a mug you’ve owned for 4 minutes, what do you think it’s doing with the house you’ve

owned for 20 years? Okay, so that’s ownership. But there’s a second thing running underneath it, and it’s stronger. It’s called loss aversion.

Same body of research. And it found that losing something hurts about twice as much as gaining that same thing feels

good twice. Losing feels about twice as painful as winning feels good. So, here’s how that plays out at your

kitchen table. You bought your home. You paid it down. You lived your life in it.

And now you’re selling. And somewhere in your head, selling doesn’t register as great, I’m getting a big fat check. It

registers as I’m losing my home. And your brain hates loss. So, it demands a premium to make the loss feel worth it.

And that premium becomes your price, not the market’s price, your pain’s price.

So, are you following me here? Okay. And here’s where it gets really specific.

Almost every seller I’ve ever sat with says some version of the same thing. But I put 50 grand into that roof five years ago. I hear things like that constantly.

And I get it. You needed a roof. And that was a real decision you had to make with real money behind it. But here’s

what’s actually happening in that moment. Your brain is treating money you already spent as money you’re owed back.

And the market just doesn’t work that way. A buyer isn’t asking what you spent. They’re asking what that home is

worth to them today. That $50,000 feels like value you’re about to lose. So, your brain adds it to the price to avoid

the pain. That’s just how the wiring works. It’s protection, not pricing. And most of the time, you don’t even feel it

happening. Now, stay with me here because the next part explains why this gets even stronger the longer you’ve

owned your home. The mug people had four minutes. You’ve had yours for 30 years.

And in neighborhoods like Willow Glenn, Cambrian, and Almaden, that’s not unusual. People buy here and they stay.

They raise their families here. I’ve sat across from sellers who bought their home before their kids were born and now those kids are having kids of their own.

So, there’s a whole other layer researchers talk about called place attachment. And the idea is that your bond to a home isn’t just sentiment. It

becomes part of who you are. So, stick with me on this because this is the part that hits home if you’ve been in your place a long time. So, think about it.

It’s where you brought the baby home, where birthdays were celebrated, where you measured your kids against the wall,

where you instinctively know which floorboard caks and which cabinet sticks. Maybe it’s the tree you planted that’s now taller than the house. Live

somewhere long enough and it stops feeling like something you own. It starts feeling like part of who you are, part of your story. And there’s this

line I keep coming back to. Buyers are buying square footage.

[snorts]

Sellers are selling 20 years of memories. That’s the whole gap right there. The buyer’s doing math and you’re saying goodbye. And you’re both sitting

at the same table signing the same paperwork like it’s the same thing. And it isn’t. So, let me get ahead of

something because I know what some of you are thinking right now. You’re thinking, “Okay, Kip. So, you’re telling me I’m being irrational and I should

just swallow it and take less for my house?” No, that’s not what I’m saying.

That’s not it at all. I’m not telling you the attachment is wrong. It’s real.

Those memories are real. That life you’ve built is real. And honestly, it should be honored. I would never sit at

your table and tell you to feel less about your home. But what I’m telling you is this. The feeling is real, but

it’s not market data. And the mistake isn’t having the feeling. The mistake is letting the feeling set your price

without you even noticing it’s happening. Because here’s what I’ve learned in 22 years of doing this. The sellers who do the best are not the ones

who feel the least. They’re the ones who understand what they’re feeling and then make room for a cleareyed decision anyway. You see the difference here?

It’s not about feeling nothing. It’s about knowing what you’re feeling. And that’s a huge part of my job when I sit down with a seller. A lot of what I’m

really doing is helping separate the two. What’s the home worth to you? And what’s the home worth on the market?

Both are true. Only one of them sets the actual value of the home. You can grieve the house and still price it to sell.

Those aren’t in conflict. In fact, doing both is what protects you. So that’s the why. That’s what’s been going on under

the hood this whole time, the endowment effect. So the second it’s yours, your brain marks it up. Loss aversion. So

selling feels like losing and your brain demands a premium. And place attachment.

So the longer you’ve been there, the deeper all of it runs. Now, none of that makes you crazy. It makes you human.

It’s your brain doing its job. You just don’t have to let it run the show. And if you want a hand separating the feeling from the number when it’s your

turn, that’s what I’m here for. My contact info is also in the description and I’ll see you in the next video. For

more home seller content, visit us at kipentam.com or just call or text us anytime.