Do Psychological Triggers Draw You to Certain Homes?

By Melissa Dittmann Tracey

Determining which home to buy goes beyond the number of bedrooms, square footage, or even location, according to Azevedo & Associates, a real estate brokerage in Granite Bay, Calif. Instead, the real estate company is asking its buyers to weigh the emotional and psychological pull of a home.

The brokerage believes such responses are a major driver for home purchasing and developed the Houseonality Quiz to lead buyers through an exercise to tap into those psychological and emotional triggers of homeownership. Read more

The Visual Nature of the Internet Has Home Owners More Attuned to Aesthetics

By Erica Christoffer

Two professions greatly benefiting from the Internet’s ability to help connect people visually are interior designers and home stagers.

First, let’s clarify: Interior design and home staging are two very distinct industries. As Jennie Norris, president of the International Association of Home Staging Professionals, points out: “Staging is all about depersonalizing a house and decorating and interior design are about personalizing a house.”

When home stagers work with a seller, they are considering elements that appeal to a broad audience. “It’s not about the seller at all. It is about presenting a product to the market (the house) and ensuring it is appealing to the buyer,” says Norris.

Both trades use design theories to accomplish different goals. But they do share the common bond of visualizing what a home could be – something home owners have grown attuned to with online accessibility and the rise of reality television shows.

“The world, in some ways because of the Internet, has gotten smaller and smaller,” says staging expert Barb Schwarz. “People are very educated and will do their research. The public is pretty darn smart when it comes to selling their home.”

Read more

How Design Psychology Can Help You Lure Buyers

By Constance Forrest and Susan Painter

Design psychology is a subject you know something about, even if this is the first time you’re hearing about it.

When we’re asked what design psychology is, our best sound bite comes from the world of real estate. When helping a buyer find a house, after going on “The Journey of Many Houses,” have you ever had the experience of walking through the door of the umpteenth house and being overwhelmed with the feeling: “YES!  This is the house!”—before you’ve even seen all the rooms?!

Most people make the decision to buy a home having spent less than 20 minutes inside it.

But why? What makes a house just seem “right” to a client so quickly?

As psychologists, we want to know what gives someone the “YES!” feeling — and as designers, we want to know how we can create it — every time. For real estate practitioners, getting to “Yes” means making the perfect match between client and property.

Design psychology is the only approach to design and architecture that recognizes our responses to the physical world are essentially emotional in nature.

At ForrestPainter Design, we’ve adapted psychological interview and testing methods to let us understand our design clients’ emotional responses to the physical world. And then we use that wealth of information to design ideal spaces for them.

Over the next few months, REALTOR® Magazine’s Styled, Staged and Sold blog will have information from the fields of psychology, neurobiology, immunology, and design that can help your clients satisfy that deepest of desires: to live in a house that is truly a home.

TRY THIS TECHNIQUE

In order to get to ‘YES!”, you need to know more about your  client than the number of bedrooms and bathrooms they want in a house. To know what their ideal home would look like — ask them!

We use a technique we call “Castles in the Air.” Read more