The why is mostly a guess anyway.
Most people who get stuck spend too much time on why instead of just noticing what and operating accordingly.
The why is hard to know. When you’re dealing with people it’s especially hard, because sometimes they don’t want you to know what they were thinking, so they don’t tell you. Other times they aren’t hiding anything but you still don’t get accurate information. A lot of the time people do things for reasons buried in their subconscious that they may not even be aware of. When they tell you why they did something they aren’t lying, but it’s also not accurate.
I was reading something this week about a company selling a business opportunity. They held seminars in various towns and tried to convert interested attendees into buyers.
They were doing well, but things got much better when someone on the team asked a simple question: what do the buyers who say yes 99% of the time have in common?
Turned out to be middle-aged married men with crew cuts.
Why? Nobody knew. The company’s answer was: who cares?
Instead of trying to figure it out, they sent people ahead of their seminars to visit local barbershops and pay them for contact info on customers who got crew cuts.
This was decades ago, so it wasn’t as creepy-sounding as it might be today. Though I always find it interesting that the people most vocal about privacy are also the ones who hand all their information to social media for free, where it gets sold in basically the same way.
Anyway.
When I do a Land Reality Check for someone, what you’re going to get is what has been happening, with a lot less focus on why. Because that’s what we can actually know, and it’s what helps you decide what to do next.
That doesn’t mean there’s no explanation at all. If you own a custom home lot, that market has been slow since interest rates rose a couple of years ago. Higher rates mean higher costs. Higher costs mean fewer buyers, other things being equal. That’s a partial why.
But I’m not getting into what caused rates to go up, when they might come down, or whether the Fed is doing a good job. That’s someone else’s job and you can find that content anywhere.
What’s been happening is what matters. The rest is mostly guessing dressed up as analysis.
PS- Most landowners aren’t planning to sell today. But things change, and when they do, the people who already understand their market tend to make better decisions.
That’s what the MBR Land Reality Check is for. It looks at nearby sales, current listings, development pressure, and the details that affect value but aren’t obvious from the road.
Is it a bad idea to know where things stand?
PPS -If you’re not ready for a Reality Check but like reading about land, markets, and negotiation, you can sign up below and get these posts in your inbox.
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