Factors affecting consumer purchasing behavior: A research in the real estate sector

The business has to consider the elements of the environment in which it is involved while determining strategies. One of the most challenging environmental elements for businesses is the consumers who occur the target market. The business that analyzes and recognizes its target audience well, offers appropriate solutions by estimating how consumers will be motivated. Because of the fact that, analyzing consumer behaviors provides great benefits in marketing management, in the evaluation and analysis of market opportunities for the businesses. The marketing activities, realizing after the market segmentation and target market selection, which is one of the main strategies of marketing, can be possible by determining the needs, demands and expectations of the consumer. Thus, every activity carried out for the management of the marketing mix elements, affects the behavior of consumers towards the products and services offered by the business. It is essential for determining market decision to analyze and determine which factors are effective on consumers' decisions to learn what, why, when, how they are buying or why they are not. The consumer decision-making process consists of several steps that the consumer experiences while making a purchase decision. Purchasing decision process starts with the recognition of a need or confronting a problem, continues with the purchase behavior that will eliminate the unrest coming into existence in the consumer and keep going with the feelings experienced by the consumer after the purchase. The influence of the consumer's purchasing decision mechanism consists of the marketing efforts and the consumer's internal factors such as the level of motivation, personality, perception, learning and attitude. One of the fields in which analyzing of the consumer's purchasing behavior become important is service marketing. Service marketing has started to develop as a sub-discipline of marketing as a result of insufficient traditional product marketing in solving problems related to services. The marketing of services is different from the marketing of goods. The advantages package, provided to clients, is derived from the service experience created carefully by the service provider business. A central part of service marketing is the process consumption rather than the consumption output of a service consuming. The consumer or user perceives the production process as a part of the service consumption. While a physical product is consumed, the clients use the product themselves; in other words, they consume the result of the production process. On the other hand, service consumer clients, perceive the service production process and are generally involved in the process phase. The purpose of this study is to analyze the real estate marketing to be evaluated in the service marketing category, in terms of consumer behavior. Turkey's real estate sector has accounted for about 8.4% of GDP in the last decade and in this sense it has become one of the most important sectors of the economy in the country. According to a report being named "Gayrimenkul ve Konut Sektörüne Bakış" which XV is prepared by Emlak Konut (2018), the Turkish housing sector has developed very rapidly in the last fifteen years. Whether the pricing and the process in housing prices is correct or not that, is one of the important points discussed in socioeconomic terms, is an important indicator for the whole economy and also for the real estate sector. Nevertheless, it is stated that the difficulty in pricing and in determining of the right price are resulted from the elements which are caused by human who is more difficult to measure and accordingly behavior patterns, become dominant from time to time. Accordingly, in this study, it is decided to focus on consumer behavior in real estate marketing. The theoretical part of the study consists of two main parts: The consumer purchasing behavior is examined in the first part and service marketing in the second part. In the third and also the research part of the study, a research is carried out in order to be determined the factors affecting the real estate decisions of the consumers. The business has to consider the elements of the environment in which it is involved while determining strategies. One of the most challenging environmental elements for businesses is the consumers who occur the target market. The reason for this is the unpredictability of how the consumers will react before changing environmental conditions even though they are affected. The business that analyzes and recognizes its target audience well, offers appropriate solutions by estimating how consumers will be motivated. When the appropriate marketing strategies are developed for the consumers who are distinguished by similar characteristics, positive reactions come from the consumers and these reactions turn to business with the increase in sales volume, market share and client loyalty. It is essential for determining market decision to analyze and determine which factors are effective on consumers' decisions to learn what, why, when, how they are buying or why they are not. When the consumer behavior models are examined, two distinctions are observed in the literature: Descriptive – traditional- behavioral models that base consumers' behavior on drives and definitive – modern- behavioral models that illustrate how behavior of consumers occurs. Descriptive behavior models explain the behavior patterns of consumers basing upon their motivation for any reason; on the other hand, definitive models try to explain how and why consumers make their purchasing decisions. Factors affecting consumer behavior and purchasing decision process are generally as follows: Psychological, personal, social and cultural factors. The consumer decision-making process consists of several steps that the consumer experiences while making a purchase decision. The influence of the consumer's purchasing decision mechanism consists of the marketing efforts and the consumer's internal factors such as the level of motivation, personality, perception, learning and attitude. Purchasing decision process starts with the recognition of a need or confronting a problem, continues with the purchase behavior that will eliminate the unrest coming into existence in the consumer and keep going with the feelings experienced by the consumer after the purchase. Determining of the factors which affects consumer behavior is also important in terms of service marketing. Since the traditionally developed marketing efforts for physical products remain incapable towards some problems in the marketing of XVI service products it leads to the development of the concept of service marketing. The marketing of services is different from the marketing of goods. The advantages package, provided to clients, is derived from the service experience created carefully by the service provider business. A central part of service marketing is the process consumption rather than the consumption output of a service consuming. The consumer or user perceives the production process as a part of the service consumption. When a physical product is consumed, the clients use the product themselves; in other words, they consume the result of the production process. On the other hand, service consumer clients, perceive the service production process and are generally involved in the process phase. These differences between service and product lead researchers to add human, physical evidence and process components to service marketing components in addition to components of marketing mix; that is, product, price, distribution, and promotion. Because of the synchronicity of services, it is possible to observe immediately whether the consumer is satisfied with the service they receive after the use of the product as it is a process of interaction between the producer and the consumer. The consumers' decision-making process of service can be considered as a three-stage process: The stage before the service purchase, the stage of the consumer's encounter with the service and the stage after encounter the service. The real estate sector is examined in the research section of the study. The aim of the study is to determine the factors affecting the buying behavior of consumers in the choice of house. In this research, it is tried to be determined the effects of demographic information, the characteristics of the real property of consumers that they live and the lifestyles of the consumers on the house choice of the consumers that they will make in the future. The study model is constituted by basing on the study of Beamish et al., (2001) and Lee (2005). In the research model, it is determined the individuals' house characteristics that they live in the current situation and demographic information as independent variables, it is tried to measure the effect of these two variables on the lifestyle and it is considered the lifestyle of the individuals as the independent variable affecting the house preferences. House properties are indicated as the subdimensions of independent variable; structure, age, size, shape, usage status and ownership of the current house. The independent variables of demographic information are gender, age, education, income, province and profession subdimensions. As sub-dimensions of lifestyle dependent and independent variable, there are sub-dimensions of welfare, social, habitat and technological features. House preference dependent variable consists of ideal house preference, characteristics of the house, living place and location of the house sub-dimensions. The following hypotheses are developed in accordance with the model designed to test the purposes of the study based on the necessary literature reviews: H1: There is a significant difference in life style in terms of house features. H2: There is a significant difference in lifestyle in terms of demographic information. XVII H3: There is a significant relationship between lifestyle and house preference. In the study, the easy sampling method was used as the data collection method. Survey method was used to collect data to be used to measure the relationship. The survey was prepared online and delivered to the respondents. A total of 278 answered surveys were obtained. In the study analysis, at first, the relationship between the house characteristics and lifestyle was investigated. While looking at the relationship between house characteristics and lifestyle, it is stated that there is a significant relationship between the shape of the real estate and the technological properties that the real estate must have. In the current study, while looking at the relationship between demographic information and lifestyle dimensions, it is obtained a significant relationship between gender and technological characteristics, and it is found that the technological features of the house are more important for men. In addition, it is detected that there is a significant relationship between gender and welfare dimension. Moreover, there is a significant relationship between age and welfare in the demographic information. The relationship between the demographic information of individuals and the characteristics of the property they have is also discussed. In the study, there is a significant relationship between the age of the individuals and the age of the property, the size of the property, the ownership of the property and the form of the property. It is observed that the province where individuals live is related to the age of the property and the size of the property. Again in the current study, household income is related to the size, structure, ownership, shape and use of the property. Looking at the relationship between lifestyle dimensions and home preference decisions, it is found that social dimension and living space dimension and technological dimension are effective in choosing living place; moreover, it is seen that technological dimension, living space size and social dimension are effective on the location of the house. Technological dimension has an effect on ideal house selection and home features. It is important to emphasize the following points in terms of guiding the professional life. It is found that gender is important in consumer behaviour and it is suggested that businesses can emphasize gender in their messages they are trying to give for real estate marketing. Since the technological features has effect on the choice of house, it is stated that if the technological features take place in the luxury perception of properties of real estates, and if the real estates have more technological feature, it could be more determinant in purchasing decisions. As there is a significant relationship between the age of individual, the age, the size, the ownership, the shape of the property and welfare in the study findings, it could be a guide for the businesses in the real estate market to make appropriate marketing efforts according to the age period by taking into account the life cycle of individuals. It is seen that income, which is the main factor in many purchasing decisions, is also an important factor in real estate decisions and it is suggested that analyzing the income level of the target market by businesses in a good way is the leading factor on the determination of study of correct product and correct price and correct promotion. It is also considered that reconsideration and implementation of the study according to regions or even provinces will be a guide for better recognition of the consumers in the market and a guide for differentiation in the competition.