Calculated Affection? Charting the Complex Economy of Home Purchase

Abstract

This paper highlights some widely cited but rarely elaborated 'local factors' influencing housing market dynamics. Adopting a microstructural perspective, the focus is on home purchase in order to complement a literature that often concentrates on the way properties are sold. Drawing from over 90 qualitative interviews from a single compact city, housing markets are characterised as collective calculating devices, whose networks of people, things, materials and relationships are engaged in the practice of price. It is argued that price is an affective as well as an economic affair, whose volatility is more an expression of sociality and emotional intelligence than an exercise in irrational exuberance.

Feels Like Home: Home Staging, Materiality, and Embodied Consumption

“…Buyers often describe an intangible feeling of 'rightness' or of feeling 'at home' in the house they ultimately buy (Christie et al 2008;Jørgensen 2015;Munro and Smith 2008). Finding the right home is often associated with emotions of love and belonging (Christie et al 2008;Garber 2000;Munro and Smith 2008). Scholars have noted the significance of identity and lifestyle matching in buyers' decision-making (Gram Hanssen and Bech Danielsen 2004;Koklic and Vida 2009;Sirgy et al 2005), and there are some excellent analyses of the role of emotion in home buying and selling (see Besbris 2016;Christie et al 2008;Munro and Smith 2008).…”

“…Buyers often describe an intangible feeling of 'rightness' or of feeling 'at home' in the house they ultimately buy (Christie et al 2008;Jørgensen 2015;Munro and Smith 2008). Finding the right home is often associated with emotions of love and belonging (Christie et al 2008;Garber 2000;Munro and Smith 2008).…”

“…Finding the right home is often associated with emotions of love and belonging (Christie et al 2008;Garber 2000;Munro and Smith 2008). Scholars have noted the significance of identity and lifestyle matching in buyers' decision-making (Gram Hanssen and Bech Danielsen 2004;Koklic and Vida 2009;Sirgy et al 2005), and there are some excellent analyses of the role of emotion in home buying and selling (see Besbris 2016;Christie et al 2008;Munro and Smith 2008). Emotions play an important role in the home buying decision (Jørgensen 2015;Koklic and Vida 2009;Munro and Smith 2008), and buyers' emotions may be influenced by market intermediaries in several ways.…”

“…Research on home buying reveals that potential buyers prefer to purchase a house that aligns with their sense of self or in which they experience a sense of belonging (Koklic and Vida 2009;Sirgy, Grzeskowiak, and Su 2005); buyers may be motivated by the longing for a particular lifestyle (Jørgensen 2015;Munro and Smith 2008) or by anxiety about possible negative housing situations or experiences (Christie, Smith, and Munro 2008;Low 2008;Low 2001). However, and importantly, potential homebuyers' perceptions of belonging, desirability and security in a particular house are not inevitable; rather their experiences are deliberately shaped by market intermediaries like realtors (Besbris 2016) and home stagers, both through social interaction and by the way these actors-along with home sellers-configure the physical space of the house.…”

Financialisation, the valuation of investment property and the urban built environment in the UK

“…With a few exceptions (for example, Henneberry & Roberts, 2008;Munro & Smith, 2008), academics tend to "accept uncritically the specific technical rationale for [a particular method] but do not consider the wider logic underpinning it" Roberts, 2008, p1229). Thus at the technical / operational level there is a dialectic between academe and practice with each influencing and being influenced by the other i .…”