How to Decide Which House to Buy

My intentions yesterday were to list homes and not to necessarily encounter a great method for home buyers to decide which house to buy. As I sat in the kitchen of a home in Carmichael, I explained to the owners how buyers often make impulse decisions and purchase a home based on emotions. Which is why I do my darnedest to evoke an emotional attachment. My goal in marketing is to make buyers fall in love with the home.

Now, in the past, whenever I showed homes, I would ask buyers to rate the home on a scale of 1 to 10. With 10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest. This helps buyers remember which homes they viewed and whether they were good candidates. One of the sellers I spoke with yesterday mentioned she bought a home a few years back and came up with her own idea of rating. It was so clever and smart that I have to share this with you. In fact, I don’t know why every home buyer would not want to use this method.

If I understand her correctly, I believe the first thing a buyer would do is make a list of things that are not negotiable in the purchase of a new home. Starting with the most important item at the top and working your way down to the lesser items. Then, assign a rating number to each issue. For example, say you have 7 things on your list that describe the type of home you hope to buy. If you gave location the highest rating of 10, you are on the right track. Next to location might be number of bedrooms. Assign a value to that. And so on.

Then, when you believe you have found your dream home, you need to decide which house to buy. There might be another home on the list that fits all of your parameters. What you would do is add together all of your assigned values and divide by the number of non-negotiable items. This will give you a weighted average.

If you cannot decide which house to buy because you are madly in love with the first house, this method will show you which is a better choice for you. Because if the weighted averages of non-negotiable items is considerably larger for the second-choice house than the averages of the home that tugs on your heart strings, this is a way to see through the emotional pull. Who can argue with logic? OK, don’t answer. Because we all know who that person is.