A FIFTH of British homebuyers decide on whether to put in an offer in under 20 minutes, according to data from new eye-tracking software

This new technology is being used to discover where prospective homebuyers are focusing their attention while they are viewing a property.

Zoopla has found that we spend just 34 seconds glancing at a bedroom and in the kitchen it’s just 1.2 minutes. The bathrooms were appraised for just 0.34 seconds, the lowest time period across the study.

It appears that prospective buyers are easily distracted by plants and pictures and are not focused on the more important structural aspects of the property.

Cellars, roofs and attics are the most overlooked rooms of the home, despite the potential of being the root causes of many problems in the building.

Instead, during a full tour of the house, a quarter of participants in the trial spent their time focusing on family photos, home technology and flowers.

Daniel Copley, Zoopla’s consumer expert, said: “It has been fascinating to use cutting-edge technology to investigate the behavioural habits of buyers so that we can equip them and sellers with the information they need to make confident decisions when buying and selling a property.

“For agents, the experiment provides insights for them on what their clients are really looking at when viewing a property.”

But why are people really wasting time eyeing up the furnishings and technology in a house they are viewing?

The psychology behind this suggests that we tend to cast a cursory glance on our first visit merely to absorb the ambience of the property and how it makes us feel. It is during any subsequent visits we tend to narrow our focus on potentially expensive repair issues such as damp or dry rot.

So, once you have decided you like the “feel” of a house, the expert advice is to wait until you have made at least one more visit to realistically assess any areas of concern before putting in an offer, and to get that all-important structural survey done. It could save time and money.