Yesterday I posted the selling lifestyle over greed article. Its a must read in reframing the sale of a home away from market timing and towards the home. It's the oldie but goodie idea of selling a house vs selling a home.
As luck would have it the brilliant Roy Williams sent his newsletter today as a Thanksgiving tribute. I am reposting some of his letter. Williams says that we all yearn for home because of a secret desire to be known. Like Norm Peterson in the TV show show called Cheers. Where everybody knows your name.
“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” - Maya Angelou
In his book, The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton describes “home” as we tend to remember it: "The house has grown into a knowledgeable witness. It has been party to early seductions, it has watched homework being written, it has observed swaddled babies freshly arrived from hospital, it has been surprised in the middle of the night by whispered conferences in the kitchen. It has experienced winter evenings when its windows were as cold as bags of frozen peas and midsummer dusks when its brick walls held the warmth of newly baked bread. It has provided psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were.”
Another quote from Williams Wizard of Ads website linked above.
"Home is an English word virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and accessibility, the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness that cling to the word ‘home' and are absent from ‘house' or even ‘my house.' Home is a concept, not a place; it's a state of mind where self-definition starts. It is origins, a mix of time and place and smell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original; perhaps like others, especially those one loves; but discreet, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate, and it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it were ever to occur, would happen. All literary romance, all romance epic, derives from the Odyssey and it is about going home. It's about rejoining; rejoining a beloved, rejoining parent to child, rejoining a land to its rightful owner or rule. Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things. And ‘going home' is where that restoration occurs, because that's where it matters most. Baseball is, of course, entirely about going home. It's the only game you ever heard of where you want to get back to where you started. All the other games are territorial – you want to get his or her territory – but not baseball. Baseball simply wants to get you from here... back around to here." - Bart Giamatti, Professor of Comparative Literature, President of Yale University, Commissioner of Major League Baseball
I leave you these ideas of home as some impetus to help you craft your reasons a buyer should buy now.
More Roy Williams as he designed a "for sale sign". The rebrand of Property Guys caused the listings to double.
It's a state of mind where selfdefinition starts.. So what would that make of luxury home owners?
Posted by: James | November 23, 2009 at 03:15 PM