Why Buyers So Often Spin Their Wheels

Many buyers are stuck sometimes because they know what they think they want, not what they really want.

Toby Israel, in Some Place Like Home. Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places (Chichester, Eng.: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), maintains that our image of the perfect living space is hard-wired into us when we're very young. And these determine what we really want.

Over time these hard-wired preferences change and become more nuanced. The main reason some buyers have so much trouble finding what they want is because they don't really know only what they think they want. She has a number of exercises in her book which can help a buyer bring their unconscious preferences to the conscious level. One of them she calls an environmental autobiography.

To complete an environmental autobiography, the buyer simply lists chronologically every residence in which he or she has ever lived. For each residence, the buyer would give what they liked and/or didn't like. By drawing out themes from the entries, the agent can gain a much more powerful picture of what the buyer wants in a home.

Agents too often focus on price range, neighborhood, number of bathrooms, number of bedrooms, and other features. They're not trained to think about these issues, and too often they just aren't curious enough about science or smart enough to think about these issues. They know the real estate process, but they tend to bumble through life.

A good real estate agent will work with buyers to determine the kinds of spaces that have resonated with them in the past. If more buyers came to grips with that, they wouldn't spin their wheels so much and the experience of finding a home wouldn't be so daunting.

I'm trying to create a more informed real estate customer. Is this working?

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