Housing Market: A Review of Purchase Decision of Potential Buyers

Abstract

The knowledge of consumer behaviour of the target market is one of the essentials in marketing of a product. All marketing strategies and tactics are based on explicit and implicit belief about consumer behaviour (Hawkins et. al., 1995, p.7). Basically buyers are two types. One is the “buyer for consumption” and the other is the “business buyer”. These two types of buying behaviours are varied largely due to some factors prevailing internally or externally to the person (buyer) and to the product. Factors associated with the buyer are age, sex, education, social class, culture and so on. Price, quality, appearance, legality, etc; are factors associated with the product. Most of these factors may or may not be outside stimuli to the buyer's purchasing decision. In brief, buyer's purchasing decisions are highly influenced by buyer's cultural, social, personal, and psychological factors (Kotler, 1999).

"Cultural factors exert the broadest and the deepest influence on the consumer behaviour" (Kotler, 1999). It is said that people are product of a culture. Certainly, cultural factors widely determine person's needs and wants, and in turn his/her behaviour i.e. the way of acquiring needs and wants. Each person belongs to a particular culture, which is narrowly defined as subcultures. Subcultures like ethnic groups or religious groups with particularly cultivated attributes make specific preference and distinct tastes among groups.

In other words, the consumer behaviour is mainly determined by some of the internal and external factors. Externally, there are factors such as culture, social class, self-image, and group influence, influence of opinion leaders, promotional communication and economic influence. Meanwhile, Consumer behaviour is affected internally by perception, attitude, learning, motivation and personality etc.

Moreover, consumer behaviour is varied due to the variety of product i.e. non-durable, durable, and services too. Consumer durable is a product that normally survives many uses. Probably, they are comparatively long life. In analyzing the consumer behaviour regarding to a consumer durable, the whole family is an important entity where such buying decisions are formulated as collective decisions. In a family, perhaps the dominant person may be the husband or wife, or both who highly involve in purchasing of consumer durables having taken the consent of the others such as spouse and children. This is because so-called consumer durables possess distinct characteristics such as;
• Long life
• Expensive
• Usable for many
• Perhaps culture specific
• Highlighting the social status
• Informative

Therefore, one time purchase like a house is likely to involve more than one household member (Harry, 1976, p.244). Thus, on the other hand, no one can easily practice a number of purchases of consumer durable. "Consumer often can not afford to learn from experience because items such as homes, cars etc are too expensive to experiment within the market place" (Nickels, 1982).