Perceived Risk, Anticipated Regret and Post-purchase Experience in the Real Estate Market: The Case of China

Abstract

The level of customer satisfaction with real estate is revealed to be low in many countries, and home buyers are even more likely to suffer negative experiences, such as perceived risk and regret, due to the current worldwide depression of property markets. Unlike most previous studies about housing satisfaction which focused on the effect of object housing and neighbourhood attributes, this paper aims to gain more insight into housing experiences from customers’ perspectives, exploring the determinants of anticipated regret and its effect on post-purchase experience. In the case of the property market in China, it was found that perceptions of risk, importance, irreversibility and difficulty in home buying evoked anticipated regret, which in turn aggravated experienced regret and dissatisfaction directly or via upward counterfactual thinking. Moreover, the dimensional structure, antecedents and cross-cultural differences of perceived risk among home buyers were studied.

Keywords:

• Housing choice
• housing market
• resident involvement
• regret
• perceived risk
• satisfaction

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant (No. G-U226) from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The study was also partly supported by the key research grant of NSF China (No. 70732001). The authors wish to thank all interviewees and questionnaire participants for their assistance with data collection.