Love at First Sight : Powerful, Unseen Motivators Are Frequently at Work in Buyers’ Decisions to Purchase One House and Not Another
Five homes on one block in a quiet neighborhood have “For Sale” signs in front of them. All are comparably priced with similar amenities. Yet the house with the strangest floor plan is the first to sell.
Why that house?
The buyers just fell in love with that house.
Asking most home buyers what made them purchase their house usually elicits a vague “the price was right,” “the location was convenient” or the “house was light and airy.”
But for buyers seized with passion to own one particular house, the answers are emotional and emphatic. “I fell in love with that house,” they say, or “I walked in the front door and felt right at home.”
Kay Mackelburg’s broker didn’t want to show her a listing on a country lane in Folsom, Calif., when she was relocating from Southern California. “But I insisted,” she said.
“The minute I entered the house, I knew my search was over,” Mackelburg said. The house had a large open area that operated as kitchen, dining, family and living room, perfect for the Mackelburgs’ lifestyle. “Nothing could have kept me from that house,” she said. “We needed a garage. It had no garage. We liked wood floors. It had concrete floors. Nothing mattered except we loved the space.”
For buyers, the conventional real estate mantra is: “Location, location, location.” Advice to sellers is to keep a squeaky clean house, paint with neutral colors and beef up curb appeal.
But real estate professionals know there’s a dimension beyond these cliches. Buyers want things from a house that they’re hardly aware of during the home-buying process: perhaps privacy, a feeling of space, a sense of the past, serenity, a closeness to nature, enclosure or protection. When they lock into a house, perhaps not the one they’ve described to their agent or even to themselves, a strong emotional tug can overcome rational considerations.
“Powerful motivations, sometimes unconscious, often lead us to the houses we buy,” said Dr. Gladys Whipple, a Pasadena psychiatrist. “One element is the ‘sentimentalized past,’ which affects a person’s perception of a house in the present.” She cited sensory factors, such as colors, that can trigger a buyer into immediately liking a house or feeling uncomfortable in it. Green cabinets in a kitchen might remind someone of an unpleasant experience as a child. A tree in the back yard might bring back happy childhood memories.
Carol Di Filippo, a Northern California marriage and family therapist, acknowledged that the “sentimentalized past” was a factor when she and her husband bought their Oakland home.
“We had signed the papers to purchase another place up the street--a better deal, actually,” she said. “By accident we saw this house, and that was it. We had to back out of the other contract. Why? I think now this house reminded me of my grandmother’s home in Whittier. The pull was undeniable; the house felt ‘familiar.’ But at the time of purchase I didn’t realize that. I just knew I had to live here and not in the house up the street.”
The past worked the opposite way with Arizona resident Don Hoffman. He recalled walking through a home during an open house in Phoenix and “actively disliking it for no apparent reason.” It was months before the answer filtered up to his consciousness: “The floor plan was exactly the same as in a house where I lived as a child. I wasn’t very happy at that time, and my dog was run over while we lived there. But I had no clue at first that the house of my past was the reason I didn’t like the house of the present.”
Another powerful motivation for many home buyers is the “idealized future.” Said Whipple: “People see the possibility for a new life opening up in a certain kind of house.”
When Diana Malazian walked into a stand-alone condo in Whittier two years ago, she knew it would be a good home. “I felt an incredible sense of serenity the minute I entered the front door and could see eucalyptus trees outside the windows,” she said. “I made the decision that if . . . I could afford to buy it, I would.”
The numbers worked out for Malazian, and so does the condo. “I’ve never been so peaceful in my life as I have been since moving here,” she said. “ . . . another benefit of this location is that when I drive to work, I pass areas that remind me of my childhood in Stockton. I find it reassuring that there are still neighborhoods like the ones I knew as a child.”
Buyers who fall in love with a house usually see it as a place where a positive future will unfold, psychologists say. It’s not necessarily the house they love, as much as their own potential for becoming a different person in that house.
From what mysterious sources do we conjure up the image of the special house that will foster personal change? According to experts, a thousand impressions from movies, magazines, television and personal experience create that house for each of us.
Passionate purchasers usually share another similarity: They buy at a transition point in their lives, Whipple said. Whether they recognize it or not, the home left behind often doesn’t support the new direction of their lives. Dissatisfaction with the old home signals a change that hadn’t been fully recognized or verbalized.
Realty sales pros say house hunters react to homes they like in predictable ways. “A client’s eyes get bigger, she stands taller and seems to really open up when the house is right and makes her feel good,” said Marie Hemphy of Shelter Realty in Riverside. “She begins to visualize playing out the drama of her life in this space. Body language tells me much more than words when a house fits a client.”
Meredith Michaels’ body language certainly expressed how she felt about a house she found in the Oakland Hills last fall: She and her husband, Leo, camped in the living room for two hours during an open house.
“I suppose you could say we ‘took possession,’ ” Michaels recalled. “We had decided to move from San Francisco to Oakland so our children could have a yard for play. So why did we buy this house built on the side of a hill with no yard? It was the ambience, the sense of history and style that the house communicated to us. Leo fell in love with the banister. That sounds crazy but the craftsmanship on the banister was so wonderful, you knew the rest of the house was well built.”
Although the most intuitive real estate agents try to get in touch with a client’s inner motivations to avoid a merry-go-round of house tours, those forces are often irrational and usually inscrutable.
Realtor Nancy Stimson of Stimson Realty in Pasadena works hard to get to know her clients so she can match them with just the right house. “Several times I’ve made a sale on the second house I’ve shown,” she said. “That’s unusual, but also what makes residential real estate so interesting--figuring out what people are after in a home when they can’t really tell you.”
One San Gabriel Valley realtor recalled a couple who wanted a “quiet” street. “I didn’t show them properties on busy streets,” he said. “Then one day they asked to see a house on California Boulevard, a lovely Pasadena street but with quite a lot of traffic. They bought the house the next day. ‘Quiet’ was how they felt inside this very elegant house, not outside.”
Added Dudley Doan of Podley, Caughy & Doan Realty in San Marino: “If I believed everything a client said, I’d never make a sale. It’s after I show a house and get a reaction, that I figure out what’s really important.”
The tumble to a house can come when you would least expect it. When she was 14 years old, Penny Bianchi saw a French-style house overlooking Arroyo Seco in Pasadena that belonged to her parents’ friends. She was so impressed by the look and location of the place she said to her mother, “Someday I’m going to live in that house.”
But when Bianchi tried several times through the years to buy the house from its elderly owners, they wouldn’t sell. Finally, when the home came on the market in a probate sale, Bianchi and her husband snapped it up, two decades after she first saw it.
On the other hand, Dave and Carol Honey looked at more than 150 houses in a relocation search that began in northern California and extended into southern Oregon two years ago.
“We couldn’t figure out why it was taking us so long to find just the right place. We’d done a lot of homework before starting to look,” Dave Honey said. “Some minor thing was wrong with every house we saw. Finally, we turned the corner on the road leading to a house on a slight hill above Mercer Lake. I looked at Carol hoping she liked the location as much as I did. Not only was the house beautiful, but it was also completely private. We hadn’t realized until then how much we wanted privacy.”
Buyers of new homes can fall in love easier than purchasers of resale homes, because builders and architects consciously play to their buyers’ ideas of the idealized future.
“Everything starts at the front door,” said Michael Woodley, chief architect for Kaufman and Broad Home Corp., California’s largest builder of single-family homes. “If (the buyer) likes the house at the beginning, he continues walking through, reinforcing first impressions or figuring out how to compromise if something is wrong.”
The open floor plan of a new K&B; home in West Lancaster was what enticed apartment dweller Bruce Rodehouse into home ownership. “The design of the house, with its angled walls, makes it feel very spacious,” he said. “And having the desert on the outside continues the open feeling of the house. It’s perfect for our small family.”
What happens to passionate buyers after they move in?
Most say the love lasts. “I am so grateful to be living in this house that I get a thrill every time I pull in the driveway,” said Penny Bianchi of the home she secretly coveted for 20 years.
Carol Di Filippo: “I love my house as much now as I did when I bought it. It nourishes me, in spite of having to bolt the foundation, repaint the exterior and re-landscape.”
Diana Malazian: “The future my house seemed to promise me has been fulfilled.”
Inducing, Evaluating Infatuation With Home
Advice for sellers: To make your home lovable, continue to clean up and paint neutral. But also consider that buyers in transition want a home where a rich future life can take place. A house will be most attractive if it looks to be a space where many different activities can take place.
Advice for buyers: Attempt to understand the factors operating in your own personality, psychologist Grace Whipple said. Ask yourself if you’re drawn to a certain kind of house for reasons that are currently valid.
Take a good look at your present needs and plans for the future. And when you go house hunting, find an agent who knows the inventory in the area you like. But don’t depend on the agent to figure out what you really want or need. A home purchase is too important to be left to the chance of finding an intuitive agent who can pull your desires out of your unconscious.
