The emotions that Florida homebuyers most often experience may surprise you.

Homebuyers experience many emotions when searching for a home, but what emotions do Florida homebuyers experience the most often?  That was the question of a BMO Harris study that looked into the psychology of homebuyers in the Sunshine State, and the results were quite interesting.

First, here is a graph we put together that compares the most common emotions of Florida buyers with those of the national average:

As you can see, homebuyers in our fine state differ from the national averages in some very intriguing ways. We are:

• More excited than the average homebuyer
• Somewhat more optimistic
• Much less hopeful
• A bit more cautious
• A smidgen happier

Those traits may seem counterintuitive, but we think there’s an underlying thread through all of them, one that’s reinforced by additional survey data from BMO Harris: housing crisis aftershock. Simply, no state suffered more from the housing downturn than Florida, yet few states have bounced back so dramatically, so you can see that mixture of optimistic and skepticism in the survey results.

Still, Floridians remain on edge – BMO Harris found that their biggest worry (from 78 percent of respondents) was that home prices would fall, and 59 percent fear not being able to afford their mortgage.