Gifts for Someone Selling Their Home

As a realtor, you know the whole process of buying and selling a home can be a very emotional one. For the seller, it is the end of an era, much of which was probably happy, but not necessarily. It could be a case of unloading an unwelcome burden from their shoulders. For the buyer, it is the start of something, perhaps the fresh start their life needs, and everyone likes to feel this is a new beginning that could usher in good times.

In the middle, making the whole thing happen, there’s you. The professional, smiling, and exuding competence, but recognizably a decent person. You’re just doing your job and getting paid for it. But part of the job is establishing yourself – and the company you represent – as someone who saw the thing through and made it a human experience rather than just a clinical transaction. These things matter in people’s lives, and it makes sense to capitalize on them. One perfect way to do this is with gifts for sellers at closing.

This idea of buying gifts for people you’ve done business with is rapidly becoming standard in many industries, but it is particularly well suited to real estate. The chief reason for that is that you get to know the people involved in this transaction. Yes, business is business, but when personalities are involved, it becomes more than that. You know that anybody can buy and sell, but a successful realtor gets results through their personality, and getting to know somebody lays the foundation for future success.

That makes real estate closing gifts for sellers a great thing to add to your professional repertoire. It means knowing how to say thank you. It means coming across as genuine while cementing your place in this highly competitive world. Word of mouth is a wonderful thing, and everybody likes to tell their friends about good experiences.

In many fields of business, this is called offline engagement, because so much interaction with clients takes place via the internet. While there may be a certain amount of that in the process of selling a house, real estate does still involve plenty of personal contact, which is what attracts many individuals to the profession in the first place. They do it because they have “people skills,” a term that can sound a little patronizing and calculating but is, in fact, what makes the world go round. It is what makes being a realtor satisfying, and part of your expertise will be in making the seller – and the buyer – feel comfortable and in safe hands.

The best closing gift for sellers may be the sale itself and the feeling of having got a good deal, but you can make them feel even better by showing you see them as an individual. From the moment you and they agree to do this together, you’ve got a relationship. Because the process can go on for much more than a few weeks, a series of gifts at various stages can show how much you value their business, but also their presence in your life. If the process does drag on longer than anyone wants, the seller needs to feel you haven’t forgotten them.

Arranging and sending gifts is a specialized area, though. There is more to it than meets the eye. You have to think about appropriateness in terms of value (high enough to be worth having but not so high as to be embarrassing) but also in terms of religious, political, and ecological considerations. For instance, if the seller is very concerned about carbon footprints and the irresponsibility of bringing in something from far away when you could have used a local alternative, your gift shouldn’t be sourced from a forest in Brazil or a seaside village in Ireland.

Even gender sensitivities have to be considered carefully these days. We are in the middle of a hugely important era of change in which diversity is not just accommodated but celebrated, and even actions based on the best of intentions have to be carefully thought through.

If that all sounds rather daunting, it needn’t be if you engage a specialist company to manage the whole process for you. What you need to do is provide the gifting specialist with good, detailed information about the recipient of the gifts, along with a schedule, if you intend to make this a series rather than a one-off at the end. Then the gifts can be chosen by people who have great experience and know how to impress as well as how to avoid unintentional offense. The gifts are delivered attractively packaged and with your message attached, with no evidence of their role; it’s from you to the client, as a gesture of your appreciation.

What are Good Real Estate Gifts for Sellers?

Again we come back to appropriateness. With a non-negotiable base of good quality, you and the gifting specialist can kick around some ideas bearing in mind what you know of the seller’s loves and interests. You can even go for something like a charitable donation on their behalf, so they receive nothing themselves, but someone deserving gets the benefit of a successful bit of business.

If you are having trouble thinking of a generally appropriate closing gift for sellers, that’s because such a thing does not exist. A branded mug or ballpoint pen and propelling pencil just won’t cut it in this field. You need a gift that says something about you as regards knowing what quality is, and also demonstrates that you understand them. Unique closing gifts for sellers is perhaps something to aim at, not because it involves a brilliant idea that no one else would think of but because you’re dealing with an individual. There is, therefore, a longer list of items you won’t consider than those you will.

This all takes time, of course, and that is another reason for letting a professional help you with it. This is not a job where the office junior can be sent out with $50 and a few ideas. And more senior figures have got their real jobs to do. This is a case where outsourcing is the correct course, as long as it appears to have been all your own work. And in reality, it will have been as your specific instructions are given to someone with the skills and resources to do a good job, anonymously, on your behalf.