Will you, a home buyer, be overcome with indecision if given too many choices? Will you spend too much if you're really excited? What if you're sad? CBS this morning did a great piece on Decisions, Decisions... and I can relate my experience with home buyers to several of these findings. I encourage you to click the link to this article, it's very enlightening.
Serve me up ALL of the homes between $150,000 and $225,000 within a 10 mile radius with at least 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and I'll make my selection. These buyers are confident they can read and glance through all of the data, even if there are 220 homes, and pick out their favorites. The data continues to come to their emails, every day, sometimes several times a day. Often, (in fact almost always) their interest in seeing all of these homes in their database makes them feel as though they have lots and lots of choices. Even if they see the right home, the information is so overwhelming, they can't pull the trigger and make a decision to pick their favorite 5 homes. They are not in an emotional place where making a decision is even possible.
Did the data overload push them backwards? Were they not ready to make a move yet anyway? Are they just trying to get a feel for the market before they strike out there and find something that fits their needs?
I think that paralyzed buyer's are hindered by "too much information", which is a difficult thing to explain to someone who worries that they might make the wrong decision if they don't have "all the information".
How many homes should a person who is ready to buy, investigate further, and how would you know when this time has come if you've been looking at data for 2 months?
What should the top criteria be for this investigation? In surveys conducted by the National Association of Realtors, neighborhood tends to be the leader in the decision making process. Since the neighborhood is very important, how about starting with the area's and neighborhoods where you really want to live and just eliminate all of the other data noise?
If a buyer is focused on what is most important, the number of homes can be narrowed down significantly, and the stress of making the wrong decision can be decreased!
Top 5 factors influencing the neighborhood choices for home buyers:
- Quality of the neighborhood
- Convenient to job
- Overall affordability of homes
- Convenient to friends and family
- Quality of the school district
A quote from the article on CBS this morning "For a long time people have said that the best way to make a decision is to be rational," Lehrer said. "And yet, in recent years, scientists have discovered that the rational brain can only take in a few bits of information at any given moment. So, you start giving it too much information and it starts to short-circuit and sputter."
Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar, who wrote the book, "The Art of Choosing," argues more isn't always better.
If you look at Lehrer's study of how people make decisions; given lots of choices, people were very excited and drawn to look and absorb all of the data, they just weren't as likely to make a decision unless the choices were fewer!
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