Thanks to Darin Persinger of Productivity Junkies, I was recently turned on to Dan Ariely’s principle, which he calls The Ikea Effect. If you have ever been to Ikea, then you know thatIkea is a successful Swedish manufacturer with a cutting-edge catalog and stores throughout the world. They offer extremely affordable furniture and household items, but the key is that it must be assembled by the buyer. The assembly is often not too easy, and the instructions for assembly generally are only in Swedish–which makes it lots of fun!
Have you ever seen a piece of Ikea furniture for sale on Craiglist? If you have, then you have no doubt seen that most Ikea items fore sale on Craigslist are extremely overpriced. That is The Ikea Effect. The theory, according to Ariely, is that “when people construct products themselves, from bookshelves to Build-a-Bears, they come to overvalue their (often poorly made) creations.”
This theory explains why some home sellers believe that their property is worth thousands of dollars more than market value—because they built a deck themselves, installed brickwork on a Saturday, or constructed a built-in bookshelf.
However, the same theory can be applied to the behavior of real estate agents. Agents may spend hours and hours creating their own websites, postcards, or marketing materials only to over value the quality of those materials. Agents may do their own short sale negotiating or transaction coordinating only to later realize that the time spent was not worth the effort. They should have hired a California Transaction Coordinator to help them and to save them time.
When considering where your real estate business is going in the remaining months of 2013, why not carefully consider what you do best and focus your time and your efforts on only those activities. In a recent meeting, renowned real estate trainer and motivator Brian Buffini said, “To grow your business, you need to take things off of your plate.” However, he said nothing about whether those plates should be stacked on a table purchased at Ikea 😉
If you want to bring your A game in 2016 and your A game does not include paperwork preparation, that’s where we can help. Please do not hesitate to contact the California Transaction Coordinators at Transaction 911.
