Of course, agents who admit to “reading” their clients insist their pattern recognition is in service of the greater good. Even (or especially) in these days of consumer online access, some of an agent’s value lies in her being able to offer a buyer a choice different from his preconception.

“Often people don’t know what they want,” said Fritzi Barbour, vice president and broker in charge of Coldwell Banker Caine in Greenville, S.C. “They don’t know what their options are, they don’t know the neighborhoods. The ability to know those other options is the value that an agent brings. You may think you want X, but if you’re shown Y, you may love Y better than you ever loved X.”

Which leads to one of the common broker routines: juggling the order of properties in a day of showing. Ms. Barbour, who has 30 years’ experience, and others interviewed agreed that they often placed their recommended properties at the beginning and the end of a day’s schedule.

Lisa Ritter, who is the owner of Re/Max Results, based in Omaha, said: “I don’t think of it as a psychological game. If I think a home is a good value and a nice fit, I’m just placing it where it will stand out.”

According to Dr. Sheena Iyengar, a professor of management and director of the global leadership program at Columbia and the author of “The Art of Choosing” (Twelve, 2010), to show one’s favorites first and last is to call up the “primary and recency effects.” The first property, she says, serves as a mental benchmark — everything seen subsequently is compared with it — while the last property, having just been viewed, is easier to recall.

Yet agents insist that they are not being tricky, for two reasons. First, a home is a well-considered long-term purchase, and with prices so high, buyers are more thoughtful than ever. “You can’t just manipulate a buyer into buying something that you want them to buy if it doesn’t meet their needs,” Ms. Barbour said.