Is home buying impulse buying?
There’s a current of thought these days, as there always is after a real estate market peak, that the late great boom was driven solely by emotionthat it was nothing more than a national orgy of impulse buying. Who thinks this? Mostly it’s Mr. Science and the other self-described rationalists who like to believe that everyone except them, which is everyone in the real estate marketplace at that moment, is an emotional, gullible lemming. It’s also the would-be market timers, who proclaim they’ll buy only at the exact momentyear, month, day, hour, minute, second, nano-secondreal estate prices hit bottom. The buyers-are-lemmings theory is always popular with people who aren’t in the marketplace because they can’t buy, or are afraid to buy, or aren’t ready to buy. And because their experience in real estate is usually sparse to non-existent, these people don’t understand that home buying is the one purchase least susceptible to impulse buying. The real story, as it always is when dealing w
