Emailed in by MBK from The Times
Ap Dijksterhuis, the Dutch psychologist, once famously conducted research which showed that people often underestimate the effect of commuting when buying property.
When given two properties to choose from, a three-bedroom flat located in the center of a city that would give them a ten-minute commute, and a five-bedroom house in the suburbs that would require a 45-minute commute, most people chose the big house, because it’s easier to conceptualise quantifiable facts, such as an extra room, than future emotions, such as how you’ll feel when you’re stuck in a long traffic jam on the commute home.
But maybe some psychologists are.
He didn't need to ask people, all he had to do was look at the relative prices of a three-bed city center flat and a five-bed house in the suburbs, as in "what people are prepared to pay in real life after having thought about it long and hard".
Selling prices are the best measure of people's preferences; the two homes mentioned sell for similar amounts; therefore on the whole, people make their own trade-off between saving 35 minutes commute and all the extra space and by and large, decide that they are of equal value. People do not automatically prefer the larger home in the suburbs.
This is why the average selling price of all flats in England & Wales is the same as the average selling price of all semi-detached houses - because flats are in city centres where the location is much more favourable and the land correspondingly expensive.
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