We just recently had a house guest who is a very dear friend of the family, who is in his fourth year of medical school. We were talking about the term “gestalt.”
According to Wikipedia is the concept that “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” It is the idea that a few lines and curves can be recognized as a figure. For example, a few lines and a circle could be recognized as a “stick figure.” The sum of the lines and curves is greater than its parts.
In medicine, it is used to describe the benefit of experience. A doctor that has been around for a while can look at a patient and immediately tell what is wrong. Or, maybe a better example is that if you showed me and a doctor an x-ray, I would see blotches of black, white and gray. The doctor could see a broken bone, etc.
An experienced exclusive buyers agent sees more than just a house.
I think this applies well to Real Estate. Gestalt is something that comes with experience, and can be earned in no other way. It is an enormous benefit to working with buyer’s agent that has years of experience, looking at hundreds of homes, especially within a specialized area. With experience, you can see patterns. With experience, you can make useful comparisons. With experience, you can spot unusual finds.
This is the reason that a first time home buyer and an experienced exclusive buyers agent could both walk into a house and the first timer would see… a house, and the buyer’s agent would see the best deal on the market. That happened to me during my home search.
The very first home that we saw on our search, our agent explained to us that this was an incredible deal. This being the first home, I didn’t really know whether or not to trust my agent. I had nothing to compare it to. I had no idea how much house my budget could buy, and whether or not this was on the low or high end.
Turns out, it was a great deal. The next 20 homes we looked at were nothing in comparison to that home. At that point, we learned to trust our agent, and we had a solid idea of what our money could buy us.
Experience is one of the greatest assets of an exclusive buyers agent.
With experience, and “gestalt,” an exclusive buyers agent provides one of the greatest benefits of all to a home buyer.
They can use this experience to point out unusually good investments for your price range in the neighborhood you are looking in.
