Rory Sutherland

Female vicar.

And it's a tidy, clean house.

At that point, you probably upweighed what you're prepared to pay by 20% or so.

In a parallel universe, the door is answered by a guy in his underpants.

In other words, someone with no shame.

In that instance, you devalue the car, I suspect, by about $1,000 or more.

In fact, you may not even buy it at all.

And what we're doing here is we're effectively saying, what I'm going to do is a stand-in for the question, do I buy the car, which I don't have the technical knowledge to answer.

I'm going to ask a supplementary heuristic question, which is, do I trust the person who's selling the car to me?

And it's an interesting question.

My mother didn't know anything about cars, knew a lot about people.

I think she would very reliably go around buying cars just through her assessment of the seller.

And similarly, I think she might do better than someone with an engineering qualification who ignored who the seller was and their personality and character.

Now, as a bit of evidence of this, I discovered because I've been investigating this.

Various real estate agents have said to me that every estate agent does their utmost to make sure that until things are signed and sealed, the vendor never meets the buyer and vice versa.

And the reason for that is if one of them doesn't like the other, they won't buy or sell.

Now, when you think about it, that's completely, unless the person's moving next door.

Obviously, if you're buying a house from someone who's planning to move next door and they turn out to be a psycho, that's relevant information.

But it seems to be the case that if you meet the vendor and you basically don't trust them or think they're a bit shifty, it doesn't matter what the price is, it doesn't matter the condition of the house, suddenly you revise your valuation of the house downwards if you don't like the person selling it to you.

And so that's one of the reasons why apparently real estate agents will leave any kind of contact between the two until after at least a survey has been done and enough commitments taken place.