Why the Keys Handover is the Most Emotional Moment in Property For Everyone
The keys themselves may seem like a small, insignificant thing; they’re sometimes left on the counter, occasionally dropped through the door, and often sealed inside an envelope. But it’s at this moment that something magical happens: the lengthy, technical and often gruelling transaction – whose legal niceties have been unfolding over weeks and even months with a focus all their own – has finally been rounded off, completed, settled. No one expects it, but time seems to slow down, and things become solemn for everybody.
A little ritual takes place; maybe tears are shed, either quietly or openly. Times and troubles are recalled, maybe for the last time, and a sense of resolution pervades the air. This can be a strange time in a life; sometimes, there is nothing at all that can prepare you for what it means and feels like. At other times, you’ve known this day was coming for months, but you’ve pushed any real thinking about it to the back of your mind; you’ve dealt with all the planning for it, prepared all your lists and to-do notes. Nonetheless, it feels like a shock. You didn’t realise that it was like this, whatever ‘this’ really means: that the house was part of you, that you were part of the house, and now you are being torn apart. For Gloucester Estate Agents, contact https://www.tgres.co.uk/
The giving and receiving of the property keys from the seller to the buyer is an often-overlooked moment in the transaction, but it might also be its most emotionally loaded moment – a crescendo even beyond the making of the offer, the exchange of contracts or the completion itself. These other events involve solicitors sitting in the same room, but they do so without the concrete, real, emotionally weighted presence of the physical keys exchanged person-to-person rather than through the post.
For one party in the transaction, the handing over and taking of keys marks a high point of hope. The culmination of a long period of searching, viewing, negotiating, worrying, endless form-filling and waiting while also chasing and hoping against hope. After all this, they stand on the threshold of owning their very first piece of property in a whole new world. In many instances – particularly for first-time buyers – it might represent an exit out of difficult circumstances, following a separation or bereavement and a fresh start into a future that, although uncertain, can no longer be ignored or put off.
