When buyers tour a home in Orlando, Florida, they are not only looking at what is there. They are also adding up what they think will need to be fixed, and that mental estimate is often much higher than the real cost of the work. Bent Danholm, broker and founder of Danholm Collection, a Central Florida brokerage that specializes in luxury homes, calls this gap the friction tax. He explores it in his new book, The Architecture of Demand, and says it shapes what buyers are willing to offer on homes that feel dated, unfinished, or confusing.
The friction tax is the discount buyers apply when something about a home worries them. Danholm is clear that it is not a precise formula. “It’s virtually impossible to determine what it is,” he says. In his experience, though, buyers tend to mentally deduct anywhere from two to five times the actual cost of a visible problem. He uses three times as a working rule of thumb. By that measure, a fix that would realistically cost $50,000 can look like a $150,000 problem to a buyer deciding what to offer.
Danholm says the reaction happens in stages. First, buyers try to estimate what the repair will cost. Then they start wondering what else they might find. The thinking goes something like this: if the current owner did not keep up with this, what other issues are hidden? A worn floor or an unfinished room signals problems throughout the whole house. Then comes the hassle. “How much agony and time is this going to cost me?” is the question Danholm says buyers are asking themselves. It is not just paying someone. Buyers know they will have to find contractors, schedule the work, and wait for it to be done. All of that gets folded into the number they are willing to offer.
Danholm’s guidance comes down to scale. For smaller items, the math often favors leaving the repair alone. “If this is something that costs $5,000, it might not be worth any seller to do anything about it,” he says. A seller can offer a credit instead, even one that reflects the buyer’s larger mental estimate, such as $15,000, or whatever the two sides agree on. For larger, visible issues, the calculation changes. “If it’s something that looks like a $50,000, $100,000 job, it really actually might be worth doing something about it,” he says. At that size, a buyer reaction of three times the cost can take far more off the sale price than the work itself would.
A practical way to apply this: Walk through the home the way a buyer would and note anything that looks dated, broken, or unfinished. Get real estimates for the larger items rather than guessing. Address the big, visible issues that are likely to trigger a large mental discount. Plan to handle small items through pricing or a credit rather than rushed repairs.
Not all friction comes from broken things. Danholm includes homes that feel dated or confusing, where a buyer cannot easily picture how they would live there. A layout that does not make sense or finishes that feel stuck in another decade can create the same hesitation as a needed repair. That is why he treats reducing friction as part of the work that happens before a home goes on the market, alongside pricing and marketing. His goal is to remove as much friction as possible before buyers start writing offers, so they react to the home itself rather than to a list of worries. Sellers trying to sort out which updates are worth making can start with a home valuation that weighs the home’s condition alongside recent sales and competing listings.
Buyers rarely discount a problem by what it costs to fix. They discount it by that cost plus the uncertainty and effort they attach to it. Sellers who understand that can make better decisions about what to repair, what to credit, and what to leave alone.
