Research into real estate buying behaviors
Background
In February 2026, a coaching client needed a native English speaker for a qualitative research project they were working on for a government agency. This country’s government planned to open property buying to more foreigners. They wanted to understand what international property purchases look like now, and what would make it smoother.
What they had
- A thirst for knowledge and an agency who would recruit participants for us.
What they wanted
- A better understanding of the decisions, behaviors, and processes related to purchasing property outside of one’s home country.
- To learn from these experiences what their country can do to make finding, evaluating, and purchasing properties smooth and attractive.
- To learn if any participants had positive or negative opinions on buying property in this part of the world.
What we did
Research Plan, Protocol, Script, Guide
60-minute research sessions with 10 participants (separately) would take place in English in a recorded Zoom meeting. The research plan was relatively simple since we mostly wanted to talk through the process in detail, and map it as people explained their experiences.
Recruiting, Scheduling, Communication
This was more difficult than expected. The outside agency started by sending participants that looked suspicious and potentially not really matching who we intended to meet.
Ultimately, we did meet 10 people, but they weren’t as diverse as we had hoped. Nine of them gave us excellent information. Eight spoke English well enough to conduct the interview themselves.
Session Execution
All ten sessions were conducted and recorded using Zoom. I shared my screen and mapped their process as they talked about it. We cycled through it a few times to make sure we got all the details, collaborators, actors, decisions, pain points, triumphs, and room for improvement.
This Miro board (distant and unclear on purpose) tracked steps and parameters of steps in yellow, room for improvement in blue, advice they would give to others about buying foreign properties in pink, and random notes in orange.
Analysis, Synthesis, and Report
Fireflies transcribed the sessions, and we worked with Claude Sonnet 4.5 to speed up the analysis and synthesis. We delivered a slide deck.
Insights, Opportunities, Suggestions
Without giving away anything confidential, the key insights were that basically, if you don’t already have trusted contacts or a community in the country where you are thinking of buying property, it makes a complicated process even more difficult.
Trusted contacts recommend good lawyers, agents, property managers, and others. They keep an eye on the process, and send photos and videos the agents don’t make time to send. They help with language barriers. They explain which neighborhoods are desirable.
We learned about participants’ expectations around how long the process should take, and what documentation they needed to have ready. They also expressed preferences for regions who had digital systems for most of the process, eliminating paperwork or having to travel to physically sign something.
We also found that some participants already had negative impressions of the country we were researching on behalf of, though that country was not revealed. We asked people about regions, and drilled down when they hit the region in question.