How We Pick The Home We Buy

August 31, 2009 | By Kelley Koehler | Filed Under Home Buying, Home Selling

Interesting post from the Zillow blog that puts a little science behind what I’ve always told my sellers – home buyers make decisions based on emotion, usually within the very first few moments they’re in the house. In my experience, those first few moments make about 80% of the decision for a large portion of the population.

The post references a Katherine Salant column. Excerpts:

In the first two or three minutes you are in a model home, your sensory organs are feeding data into the emotional centers of your brain. As you glance at the living room, these emotional centers rapidly register the details.

Then, on the spot, the emotional networks vote up or down. The deal starts or ends with the firing of a few billion neurons.

If our nearly instantaneous visceral response is positive, our dopamine receptors go into overdrive, Lehrer said. They make us want that house, and they make us want it immediately.

Once your emotions have voiced their opinions, a different set of neurons in the frontal cortex, which control your brain’s "executive function," start to kick in. They generate seemingly logical reasons why a particular house is the one, Lehrer said. As you continue to think about this purchase, your list of good reasons gets longer: It has all the formal living and dining space that we need for resale! We’ll have a place to put great aunt Julia’s living room set, which we just inherited! We can have romantic dinners for two by the fireplace in the family room!

This is why I’ve always argued that the point of good home marketing is to get a potential home buyer inside the house. When I represent home sellers here in Tucson, I want to show people enough information, pictures, and details that they’re curious to see more, that they’re drawn to see the house in person. I want that visceral emotional reaction from those home buyers.

I don’t want someone looking online and rejecting a house because they looked at 50 pictures and decided they don’t like the oak cabinets or the guest bedrooms seem to small in the virtual tour – I don’t want potential home buyers dismissing a house out of hand because of some perceived flaw or omission, most of which could be changed or otherwise addressed. I want people in the house, seeing it in person, getting that emotional reaction. That’s successful home marketing.

All of which – if you’re looking to buy a home - is why you should work with an agent who knows your wants and needs, who understands that you can get caught up in that visceral reaction, and can remind you to evaluate the house from a more objective view point.

tags: decision making, real estate, tucson

Comments

5 Responses to “How We Pick The Home We Buy”

Jason on August 31st, 2009 12:51 pm

Any agent can list a house. It takes a true agent that is plugged in and has the ultimate outcome in mind; to “Sell a house”.
Marketing, presentation and perception will all dictate whether or not the property commands top dollar and sells in a timely manner.
Scott on August 31st, 2009 4:59 pm

I kind of agree with the article, which I interpret as saying “the job of the realtor is to eliminate all the obstacles to the house selling itself”. That means competent marketing, so potential buyers don’t bypass the house listing without ever visiting it because of a too-high price or an unappealing picture. It means hopefully getting the seller to take advice (good luck with that) and make needed changes.

The realtor baits the hook. The fish decides whether or not to bite.
Matt on September 2nd, 2009 7:56 am

Having just bought and sold a house in the last 6 months I totally agree. We had a list of must, shoulds, and mays that we were using while house shopping, but at the end of the day it came down to those first 5 minutes of looking at the house. The remaining time was just to confirm our initial assessment.

Also, I can’t agree more about what the buyer agent should be doing. The agent should help the buyer remove the emotion from the purchase decision and to think about the things that they may have overlooked.

The perception and presentation are key. It has to allow the buyer to easily visualize their own possessions in the house and what it would be like if it was their house. I was amazed at the number of houses that we looked at that were pigstys. And we weren’t looking at cheap houses. So i don’t know what the sellers were thinking. But when I look online, they are still on sale. The houses that seem to sell are the ones that show well.

The same was true for the house we sold. Our listing agent was so excited when she got the listing for our house as she knew our house would show well and told us so. The house sold in 7 weeks for the price we listed it at. There were and are still houses in that neighborhood that are still for sale.

At the end of the day its all about price and creating the perception that matches the price.
Kelley Koehler on September 2nd, 2009 12:50 pm

Scott – I think the article also speaks to where people should focus their energy and money, given limited resources, when selling their house. If we know first impressions are so important, than money is better spent on the front yard and entrance rooms than on the back.

Mat – Thanks for sharing your experience! It’s always interesting to be both a seller and a buyer in a short time span – we reason totally differently depending on what side we’re on at the moment.
Matt on September 2nd, 2009 7:10 pm

One thing that we did that I think may have helped was we put one of those digital picture frames out on the table with the other info about the house. Then on the digital picture frame we loaded it up with a bunch of pictures of the house throughout the seasons so the potential buyers could look at the pictures while touring the house. So instead of putting them all online in the listing to see, we put about 6 teasers online and then the balance on the digital picture frame. This way the buyers could linger in the house some after touring and visualize even more.

It took a lot of effort and research to sell the house. It was a really nice house, in mint condition, in a desirable location. At the end of the day it still comes down to price, location, presentation and a good realtor. Our Realtor knew the neighborhood as she lived there and thus knew the competition well and what the price needed to be to sell it. We worked out a pricing strategy and then let her do her magic.

And ironically, the house we bought was not close to what we really envisioned when we set off house hunting. The house we bought met some of the criteria, but it just felt right when we walked in the door.

Got something to say?

Tucson Real Estate Market Overview – Fun with Charts

$8000 Tax Credit for First Time Home Buyers – Expires Soon

Subscribe in a reader

Search this Site

Other Information That Might Be Helpful

Where’s the Floorplan? (April 22, 2009)
Question from the audience: why do listings for existing homes show tons of details, maps, pictures, virtual tours, fact sheets about every possible detail – but not floorplans?
My Answer:
I do floorplans occasionally – they’d be linked along with the rest of the virtual media. I know in some other parts of the country, it is [...]
What Is Your Agent Thinking? (February 13, 2009)
Got a blog topic request from a regular reader that starts:
I often wonder what’s going through a realtor’s mind when we look at a house. I have a feeling that every trip, a realtor is having a silent conversation that ends up with a decision "yes, I’d buy this house" or "no, not in a [...]
Arizona Rooms and Tucson Homes (July 3, 2009)
An Arizona room can be a wide variety of things – it is sort of a catch-all term. Most often, an Arizona room started life as the original patio off the back of the house, usually covered, and then someone eventually closed it in. Sometimes, a new covered patio is added off the back of the Arizona room.