What Women Want : Women now make most of the home-buying decisions. So it’s important for builders to know what they are looking for

When marketing consultant Faith Popcorn spoke to home builders at the Pacific Coast Builders Conference in San Francisco earlier this year, she was there to predict the future: who the home buyers will be and what features they will want.

Popcorn has an impressive track record forecasting social trends. She predicted the stay-at-home phenomenon she dubbed “cocooning” and the popularity of four-wheel-drive vehicles. She has an equally impressive roster of clients, including American Express, Kodak and IBM.

Her advice to the builders: Pay attention to women. They are the key players in home-buying decisions, and the way builders deal with them and the types of homes they offer will be critical.

Women have always had their say-so in home buying, but in years past, builders have placated them with household gadgets while maintaining eye contact with their husbands.

Nowadays, Popcorn said, such thinking could be dangerous to a home builder’s business health. Women now make most of the home-buying decisions, Popcorn said, and have veto power over the rest. So it’s important to understand how women view home buying and what they want.

When it comes to the home-buying process--the deal making, especially--women are very different from men, Popcorn told the home builders; she elaborated in a telephone interview. How a home is sold is as important as what’s being sold, she said.

“Women need to form a relationship with the seller before and after the sale. Builders need to get to know customers before they trot them through a piece of real estate,” Popcorn said. “Give women buyers your home phone number. Women want to know there’s someone to call with a question or a problem.

“Home builders should look at what’s happening in car selling,” she suggested. “They need to take the Saturn approach,” referring to the GM subsidiary that promises (and delivers) a no-hassle, no-dickering experience in the showroom. “Women want everything up front. They don’t want to bargain.”

Dana Eggerts, president of Creative Design Consultants in Costa Mesa, whose business is designing the interiors of model homes, agrees with Popcorn’s Saturn analogy. “Women see right through the games. That’s why buying a car is so unpleasant. They want a soft sell. The building industry would be doing itself a favor if it realized that.”

Cultivating a relationship with a female buyer becomes even more important in today’s buyer’s market, in which drawn-out decision-making is commonplace.

“Buyers aren’t buying on the first or second visit anymore,” Eggerts said. “Now they come back 10 times. They bring friends and relatives. It takes a tuned-in salesperson to sustain and close the deal.”

“Women are definitely looking for a relationship and bonding when they buy,” said builder Kathryn Thompson, president of Kathryn Thompson Co., who has projects going up in Aliso Viejo, Oceanside and Santa Clarita.

“All my sales people are women,” she said. “Making the sales pitch to the male of the couple blows the deal. Women don’t want to be treated like the little woman.”

But eye contact and home phone numbers aren’t enough for today’s female buyers. The house has to meet their needs, which means builders must appeal to many lifestyles.

The new woman home buyer defies categorization, according to the marketing experts interviewed for this report.

There are certainly many women in nuclear families (Mom, Dad, two children) who don’t work outside the home. But there are also women who go to work, women who have home-based careers, single moms with kids, single women, women co-purchasing with roommates, women who have no intention of having kids, women whose kids have grown.

So, Popcorn and the other experts advised, builders have to offer flexible spaces, because one buyer’s nursery is another buyer’s home office. One wants more closet space, another an oversized garage; some want twin master suites.

Home offices are a big thing with women, Popcorn asserts. “Last year, twice as many businesses were started by women [as by] men. Begun and run by women. Many of them out of their homes. Home builders have to understand that they are selling houses as income-producing bases. That means hookups for faxes, a room for an office or a little manufacturing business.”

Carol Eichen, president of Carol Eichen Interiors in Santa Ana, has been designing model homes for 30 years. She’s noticed that home offices have become “the second most common use of the non-master bedrooms, after children’s rooms. It seems everyone wants a quiet place to work.”

When interior designers begin planning models, they often dream up imaginary prospective owners with whom real prospective buyers will, they hope, identify. “Fifteen years ago, I was doing models with home offices for older, retired males,” Eggerts said. “They were in move-down homes [the industry term for a smaller, empty-nest house or condo for older buyers]. It was where men put their golf trophies and went to check the stock market. Now I often theme a home office to a female architect.”

Thompson plans the models for her developments with designers. “We imagine 80% of the women working outside the home,” she said. Most of her models are specifically designed to strike a chord with them. “We might do one for a woman engineer or attorney. In smaller detached cluster homes and condos, many of the buyers are non-couples, so we do dual master bedrooms. Separate and equal.”

Often both adults (related or not) require home offices, Eggerts said. “Separate spaces. Maybe one is a formal office in a bedroom, another in an alcove.” A stay-at-home mom might “want a computer and fax for charity work,” Thompson said. Popcorn agrees: “Put in a tiny office off the kitchen.”

It is essential that models appeal to women buyers, the experts say. “If they walk in and can’t visualize their family around the table at Thanksgiving, forget the sale,” Thompson said.

“Women react to the model homes more than men do,” said Claudia Roxburgh, whose Roxburgh Agency in Costa Mesa handles advertising for many Southland builders. “They take it all in and they’ll say, ‘This really works.’ ” The future of the kitchen, however, is in dispute.

In Popcorn’s view, “women don’t give a damn about kitchens.” Her women don’t cook but rely on convenience food and takeout. Eichen’s women still consider the kitchen to be the focal point of family life. “When women come home from working at an outside job, they want their children around them while they’re preparing dinner,” she said. “This may be their first real time together during the day. And the children want to be near them.”

Eggerts says kitchens are still important to women, even if they use them primarily to make coffee and zap something in the microwave. “They are still trophy rooms,” she said, something to brag about to guests whether the homeowners are cranking out fresh pasta on a regular basis or not.

Popcorn and other marketing experts agree that most women buyers place great importance on the kitchen’s location in the room plan. “If a kitchen is in the wrong location, women don’t buy the house. They want a family area that includes the kitchen. They don’t want to be isolated.”

Since many working women buyers are also mothers, traditional family needs are as critical as room for a fax machine. Roxburgh believes that women are turned off by “teensy children’s rooms.”

“Moms want good-sized kids’ rooms,” agreed Randall Lewis, executive vice president of Upland-based Lewis Homes of California, which has projects in Las Vegas, Sacramento, Palos Verdes and Azusa. “They ask about school districts and test scores. They may drive a larger vehicle and need an oversize garage. But another woman, without kids, would rather have an oversize closet than an oversize garage. Today it’s very segmented when you’re talking about women.”

Even working mothers go beyond the two-child nuclear family category, Lewis said. “We see Brady Bunch families, when five or six kids from previous marriages have to fit under one roof. Or kids who just visit on weekends. Or adult kids.”

To accommodate everyone’s needs, builders must offer bedrooms that are flexible. “We hold focus groups and ask what people do with the bedrooms and how many they want,” Lewis said. “Single working women may not want a six-bedroom house, but they still want four. They need a home office, an exercise room and a guest room.”

“Women want security features,” Popcorn said. “Many women are buying on their own or their husband travels a lot, so alarm systems are important.”

In condo shopping, Lewis said, “women look at parking very carefully to see if they’ll feel safe walking to and from their car.”

Despite her lack of enthusiasm for time spent in the kitchen, cocooning remains one of the cornerstones of Popcorn-think. Rather than going out all the time, people would prefer to stay at home--and order in, of course. Home, where it’s safe. Popcorn believes that builders must provide that cocoon for women buyers to be smitten with their product.

Buyers, especially women, are looking for a warm, cozy place, Roxburgh said. “The market’s changed. You can’t sell a house by saying ‘Quick, buy it before it goes up another $40,000.’ Now you sell a home as a retreat from the work world, as a getaway.”

Popcorn’s cocooning dovetails with a concept that Eichen calls “LifeSpace.”

“We are fighting the world so much, the inconvenience, the stress, the crime, that a house needs to be a relaxing place to come home to. And now that so many women are out in the working world, they need a safe haven.” To meet that need, Eichen designs “spa” rooms. “Every woman wants to go to La Costa, but most can’t,” she said, ‘so this is an alternative. Besides exercise equipment, she puts in a TV, refrigerator, a stack of thick towels. “Women buyers love it. It’s their spot.”

Melinkoff is a Los Angeles free - lance writer.