Vision of Home: a Real-Life Smart Woman’s “List”
In the WRELDA certification courses, we talk at length about the Vision of Home – how to help a women real estate consumer create a written document that renders their vision concrete, what that document or image should address, and how we as WRELDA’s can use it to provide a clear direction for the house hunt, manage freak-outs and obliterate buyer’s remorse.
This week’s NYT features an article which truly validates the Vision of Home concept. The subject of the article is Dr. Erica Friedman, a single doctor/professor looking to relocate from the suburbs to Manhattan with her college-aged kids and elderly father.
Dr. Friedman simply created a checklist for the things that were important to her, harnessed her uncanny ability to visualize a space and compared the online floor plans and building amenity lists, photos and renderings against her own “list” – The List, if you will.
Dr. Friedman’s list is what a WRELDA would call a Vision of Home. And the article speaks directly to the freak-out preventing, mindset managing power of her List/Vision of Home:
As for those things she couldn’t control or predict — well, they weren’t worth worrying about.
“I was able to define what was critical for me,” Dr. Friedman said. “Some of the specifics had to do with location and finances, which you don’t have to walk into a building for. A lot had to do with amenities, which are either there or not.”
In reading the article, you’ll see that Friedman’s list/Vision of Home was about much more than amenities, it was truly about what she wanted the minute, yet impactful, details of her life to look like in the ‘AFTER’ picture – after she lived in her new home. For example, she’d commuted for 2.5 hours a day for 15 years; as a result, her ‘AFTER’ vision included a walkable distance from home to work. She wanted her aging Dad to maintain the dignity of having a car at his disposal; accordingly, a home with a garage was a must. Friedman had long loved to swim for stress management, so a place with a pool was a plus.
Read the full article, here, for a living, breathing, on the ground example of how one smart woman homebuyer crafted her own written Vision of Home and put it to use. In the end, Dr. Friedman found the home that ultimately met her “every criterion” sight (and site!) unseen – over a year before the building was even finished. And she owes it all to her List.
