We buy with emotion. We just use logic to justify it

Author | Paul Skuse, Oakfield Design & Creation

Think about the holiday you’ve just come back from this summer, or perhaps the one you’re about to take.

When you first started looking, chances are you didn’t begin by studying flight times, working out the drive from the airport or checking exactly how far the nearest town was from the property. You probably started somewhere altogether more appealing.

Perhaps you saw a beautiful villa sitting high above the Mediterranean or the Aegean, with a terrace overlooking the sea, a pool catching the late afternoon sun and interiors that immediately made you imagine throwing open the doors and stepping outside with a large G&T.

You looked through the photographs, explored the surrounding coastline, found the restaurants you might wander into for dinner and, without really noticing it happening, began imagining what it would feel like to spend a week or two there. Before you’d worked out whether all the practicalities stacked up, a part of you was already on that holiday.

That’s how so many of our buying decisions begin. We see something, we feel something and we start to want it, before the more rational part of our brain arrives and begins asking the sensible questions.

Then comes the checklist. Can we get the flights we want? How long is the drive from the airport? Does the villa work for everyone who’s coming? Is the location right? Are there good restaurants nearby? Is there enough to do when we want to venture beyond the pool? Does it fit the budget and can everybody make the dates work?

We work our way through those practicalities and, assuming enough of the boxes are ticked, something interesting happens… we return to where we started, looking at those photographs again, imagining the terrace, the view, long lunches, warm evenings and how good it will feel to be there.

The rational part of the process hasn’t necessarily made us want the holiday, it’s given us permission to trust a decision that emotion had already encouraged us to make.

And buying a home is exactly the same.

The rational middle

There is, of course, a significant rational component to buying a property and particularly a new home.

How many square feet is it? How big are the bedrooms? What’s the kitchen specification? Is there a garage? How many cars can fit on the driveway? How long is the commute? Where are the schools? How energy efficient is it and does the layout genuinely work for the way the buyer and their family want to live? All of these things matter enormously but if the home fails on something fundamental, no amount of beautiful marketing is going to overcome it.

I’ve always thought of these practical considerations as sitting within the narrow middle of an hourglass-shaped buying journey.

At the wide top is emotion, imagination and desire. The journey then narrows as the buyer moves into scrutiny, comparison and rational justification, before opening out again once those practical questions have been satisfactorily answered and the buyer begins imagining something much bigger than dimensions, specifications and EPC ratings.

They begin imagining their life there.

And that’s why I think the beginning of that hourglass deserves far more attention than it sometimes receives.

Before buyers measure it, they have to want it

Today, a potential buyer might encounter a development for the first time through a CGI on Rightmove, an Instagram post, an agent’s email, site hoardings or the development website and within those first few seconds they’re already forming an impression.

Before they know the dimensions of Bedroom Three or have studied the floor plan, they’ve appreciated the architectural design, the landscaping and the aesthetics of the beautiful kitchen and island. They’ve noticed the flooring, furniture, lighting and interior styling, absorbed the quality of the photography or CGIs and been swayed by the quality of the branding and overall presentation.

Without consciously analysing every element, they’re already answering a much simpler and more instinctive question:

Do I want to know more?

That’s an emotional response and it’s worth thinking about our own behaviour for a moment. Whether it was the holiday you’ve booked this summer, the last car you bought or the home you’re living in now, did you really begin with a spreadsheet of rational criteria and eventually discover something you loved?
Or did something make you want it first, before you began checking whether the practicalities backed up that want?

The bar has moved

This becomes even more important in a market where buyers have more choice, are taking longer to make decisions and are prepared to be considerably more selective about where they spend their money.

Today’s buyers are visually sophisticated. They’re surrounded every day by beautifully presented products, brands, hotels, restaurants, cars and interiors, which means their expectations aren’t being shaped solely by the other new-build developments competing within a five-mile radius. They’re being shaped by the entire consumer world around them.

As a result, presenting a good home in a perfectly adequate way is no longer enough to create the level of desire required to make somebody stop, look and want to know more.

The quality of the kitchen matters because it’s one of the key spaces where buyers can most easily imagine themselves living. The flooring matters, as do the lighting, interior styling and landscaping, while the quality of the CGIs becomes particularly important when you’re asking somebody to fall in love with a home that doesn’t physically exist yet.

Even the experience of arriving at the development matters. The signage, site entrance, sales suite, show home and general quality of the environment and experience are all reinforcing, or undermining, the emotional response that began online days, weeks or even months earlier.

None of these things changes the square footage of the property, but together they can dramatically change its desirability and that’s an important distinction.

A beautifully considered kitchen, for example, isn’t simply a collection of units, worktops and appliances presented as a specification. At its best, it’s one of the strongest emotional signals within a home because it’s somewhere a buyer can immediately begin picturing mornings, evenings, friends, family and everyday life.

The specification provides the rational reassurance, while the way the space looks and feels creates the desire that can fuel the sale.

Better doesn’t necessarily mean more expensive

There can sometimes be an assumption that raising the standard of a development’s presentation inevitably means spending significantly more money, when often it’s much more about being considered in where and how that money is spent.

Better creative direction, stronger CGIs, thoughtful interior styling, carefully considered kitchens and finishes, good landscaping and a more sophisticated approach to branding can all contribute, but perhaps most important is the consistency between what somebody sees when they first discover the development online and what they eventually experience when they arrive on site.

The objective isn’t extravagance for extravagance’s sake. It’s ensuring that the quality and desirability of the development are immediately apparent to the person you’re asking to buy it.

Because when several developments all sit within roughly the same buyer budget, the decision is no longer simply about which homes somebody can afford. Increasingly, it’s about which one they actually want.

And that’s a very different competitive battleground.

Emotion, then logic, then back to emotion.

We like to think we’re rational buyers and, of course, rationality plays an important part in any significant purchase, particularly something as financially consequential as a home. But human beings haven’t suddenly stopped being human because they’re scrolling through Rightmove.

We notice how something looks and how it makes us feel, we imagine ourselves experiencing it and only then do we begin investigating, comparing and rationalising whether it can work.

If those rational questions are answered satisfactorily, we emerge on the other side with something arguably even more powerful than the initial attraction: the confidence to trust what we wanted in the first place.

So perhaps there’s one useful question for developers and agents to ask when they next look at their own development through the eyes of a potential buyer:

If your ideal buyer discovered your development online for the very first time today, before they’d read the specification or studied the floor plan, just how desirable would it feel?

Because before you can give somebody enough reasons to buy your development, you first have to give them a reason to want it.

Oakfield Perspective is our series exploring the thinking behind how residential developments are positioned, presented and ultimately chosen. Drawing on our experience working alongside developers, agents, architects and interior designers, we share practical observations on buyer behaviour, design and marketing, with one simple aim: to help create developments that people don’t simply notice, but genuinely want to live in.