Apparently, not. Although there has been much less home buying activity across the entire country recently, what little there is turns out to be mostly activity of the unconscious or emotional brain.
Some things we do better with our frontal cortex and other things we do better with our emotional brain. Jonah Lehrer, in his book How We Decide, describes the poor selections that were made by buyers during an experiment conducted in an Ikea furniture store, using their rational brain. Buying furniture, it turns out, is similar to home buying. In this experiment, people who spent more time thinking about their purchase were unsatisfied with their purchases later on. Those that thought less about it and made an emotional decision, were happier afterward. The problem here is one of size. It seems that, the rational brain does well with small computations, but when it is overcome with too much information – like, is this couch the right color, will my cat scratch it, is it long enough? – our rational brain gets backed up and makes poor decisions.
Kevin Oakley, the sales director of Hartland Homes, a Pennsylvania homebuilder, recognizes this characteristic – that people are inclined to use the emotional part of the brain rather than the prefrontal cortex, or rational brain area in choosing a home. And, he has dramatically improved the sales performance at a string of subdivision openings for Hartland, using this understanding. For example, by using Oakley’s method, eight homes were sold during a one-day open house – the same number as were sold during the entire previous year at the same subdivision. He discusses this in his newly published e-book called Presale Without Fail. He shows the reader how he re-creates the buyer urgency we used to see four or five years ago at new subdivision openings. By better structuring marketing and sales functions so that one drives the other, Oakley has turned around the current laid-back buyer attitude at his subdivisions, and created deeper demand from the prospective buying public that appears at new Hartland sales openings. Buyers might yell foul, but if the sales manager adheres to these methods, buyers will have to fight back with rational tactics of their own to keep from falling into the buying frenzy.
Remember the different functions of each of these two brain areas next time you need to decide an important issue.
Geoff Wood
9/25/11