Determinants of Anticipated Regret and Its Impacts on Post-purchase Experiences in Home Buying

摘要

Recent transaction volumes of residential markets have declined greatly in many cities of China. Price trend in real estate market is full of uncertainty after several years’ soaring. Moreover, it is reported that homebuyers deemed the China real estate industry rather low in credibility. Thus, perceptions of untrustworthy developers (or brokers) and ambiguous tendency of property price, bring great uncertainty to many customers in terms of perceived risks and anticipated regret. However, little research on real estate has focused on these concepts and their influences on post-purchase experiences. This paper demonstrated that difficulty, importance, irreversibility and perceptions of risk in house buying decision process evoke anticipated regret, and perceived risk was revealed to be the most powerful predictor of expectation of regret. In turn, anticipated regret triggers experienced regret directly and indirectly via upward counterfactual thinking. Furthermore, three dimensions of perceived risk were identified in residential purchases: performance risk, well-being risk and purchase timing risk. Self-occupancy buyers were found to worry about performance risk most. Limitations of the study and implications for real estate marketing practice were also discussed.