“With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all.”
-Barry Schwartz
Wait, what? More options are better, right?
As it turns out, we all like options, but we don’t like too many options. Too many options make us LESS likely to buy, and MORE likely to have buyers remorse after we make a purchase.
While this may seem contrary to our nature, we see it play out in daily life. Have you ever flipped on Netflix and not been able to choose something to watch? How can that be if you have 1000s of options available? Compare that to watching cable 20 years ago…was it easier to choose something when you had fewer options, or more?
A few years ago, Columbia University performed a study that confirmed this idea of too many options impairing choice. They looked at whether increasing the number of 401k options affected the consumer’s ability to make a choice. The researchers discovered that “giving consumers too many options can impair their ability to make skillful choices and erode their ability to determine the optimal choice for them.”
In our industry, we see consumers struggle with too much choice on many retailer and community operator websites. Consumers will go to a website to find a home they love, only to find that the seller has listed every single home from every single manufacturer they carry. This can oftentimes be hundreds of homes, and the customer becomes overwhelmed and leaves the site completely.
I understand the strategy: show the prospective buyer a huge amount of options, and they’ll buy from you because they’ll know they have every option imaginable. But like choosing a Netflix show, having too many homes to choose from will cause buyers to not choose at all.
When we look at website traffic data, we see that most MH website engaged visitors, on average, will spend anywhere from 4-7 minutes on a website. If they like a home, they will typically spend 1-3 minutes looking at that particular home. When we do the math, we can deduce that engaged visitors typically have time to look at 3-5 homes before they’re outta there. If there are more than that many homes that meet their criteria, they can become overwhelmed with too much choice.
Still don’t believe me?
Let’s take a look at some cookies… : )
By almost all measures of business, Crumbl Cookies has seen tremendous success. Crumbl Cookies is a franchise model dessert store founded by two cousins in Logan, UT in 2017. In 2018, they were at 18 franchised locations, and today in 2025, they have over 1000 and bring in over $12 billion in annual revenue.
One of the keys to their success is their simple menu. Each location will typically have 7 flavors of cookie, two sizes, and a handful of drink offerings. That’s it. This limited, but delicious, selection makes it easy for the consumer to choose what they want and move on with their day. The combination of high quality and manageable choice has made Crumbl Cookie one of the fastest growing franchises of the last decade.
How good are they, you ask? They’re the favorite cookie of some of the team here at Bild Media, and I can assure you that these two have very particular, refined tastes. 🙂
“But David – we’re selling homes, not cookies. Customers want lots of options on purchases that large…”
Do they though? Tesla sold 1.8 million cars last year, and they have 5 models. Large apartment complexes with thousands of units will typically have a handful of floor-plans to choose from, not hundreds. We see it across all consumer industries: people like choice, but not overwhelming choice.
Does this mean that you only need to sell 7 homes and forego the rest? Of course not. It simply means that you need to be aware that more selection is not always better, and that a curated selection of homes can be better for the consumer than shot gunning them with 250 different floor plans.
Look at your market, look at what your manufacturers offer, and choose the homes that meet the needs of your target buyers.