Buyers Like Single-Story Homes
There’s no question that as people grow older they begin yearning for fewer steps. But home builders don’t seem to be getting the message.
Although the population has aged over the last 20 years, the percentage of new single-story houses has declined, according to the Census Bureau. Between 1980 and 2000, the share of ramblers (also called ranch houses) dropped from 60% to 46%.
At the same time, the percentage of two-story dwellings increased, from 31% to 52%. One reason for the shift is that seniors and aging boomers don’t buy as many houses as younger families, and most builders aim for the larger audience. Another factor is cost. Single-story houses are more expensive to build on a square-foot basis because they require wider foundations and larger roofs, among other things.
That doesn’t stop people from preferring one-story living, a fact that is driven home in the latest “What Buyers Want” survey from the National Assn. of Home Builders. Of the 1,180 people who responded to the questionnaire, 52% said they favored a single-story layout, while 35% voted for a two-story plan.
To be fair, people were asked which style they preferred, assuming the same floor area in each. They weren’t told the one-story would be more costly.
“The cost of building a second story is less than what it costs to add the same space to the first floor,” says NAHB research director Gopal Ahluwalia.
Had they known exactly how much more they would have to spend for a single-story house, or how much less square footage they’d get for the same amount of money, they might not have been so eager. Nevertheless, the call for single-story living was loud enough to catch researchers off guard.
“That surprised us,” says Ahluwalia, who believes the finding is not necessarily universal. He says it’s mostly a function of age, location and cost.
Older people favor only one level, while younger folks don’t mind two or even three, he explains. Also, one-story houses are more common in the South and West, where land is still relatively plentiful, and the preference for two-story houses rises as incomes increase.
Maybe so. But it’s also worth pointing out two facts that builders seem to have forgotten: First, most people say they want to live out their lives where they are now, which is often near friends and family. And second, older home-buyers who have progressed up the housing ladder tend to have more money to spend than their younger counterparts.
The survey points out a number of other inconsistencies. . One is the so-called smart-growth movement to bring families back in toward the urban core so local government won’t have to build the costly roads, sewers and other infrastructure needed to support residential development. However, only a third of recent and potential buyers queried by the NAHB want a close-in location. The rest want green, not asphalt. Almost a third prefer a rural location, and 37% favor an outlying suburban locale. People want bigger homes, though, not smaller ones. About 35% were living in a dwelling with less than 1,500 square feet of finished area. Only 15% said they’d trade down in size. The other 85% wanted to trade up, often from a current median of 1,770 square feet to a new median of 2,071 feet--a significant increase in space. (The median size of all new single-family houses built last year was 2,055 square feet.)
Respondents want larger lots too. The minimum acceptable lot size for this current group is 22,000 square feet, which is significantly larger than the median 9,800-square-foot lot the last group said would be satisfactory in 1995.
But respondents also said they’d be willing to make some compromises. To balance their desires against their budgets, more than half said they’d take some of the space in their new dwellings unfinished. But in reality, that won’t help much. Drywall and paint are probably the least expensive parts of adding extra square footage. About three in 10 said they’d take a smaller lot, and one in four would stomach a longer commute. But only one in four said they’d sacrifice space to save money.
As anyone who has ever purchased or built a new house knows, the process is nothing if not a series of trade-offs. So what could this group of respondents do without? Nearly half said the living room was expendable. Given a choice between a living room and family room of equal size, or a larger family room but no living room, 46% said they could do without a living room.
However, when the question was phrased somewhat differently (“Would you be willing to purchase a home without a living room, provided the space was used elsewhere in the house?”), only a third said yes. Even when given the option of expanding the kitchen at the expense of the living room, most folks balked. Just a third said they’d give up living room space for a larger-than-average kitchen.
Perhaps signaling that builders have taken the big-bath syndrome far enough, two-thirds said they’d rather have more space in the master bedroom and less space in the master bath. Home buyers don’t want to give up their bedrooms, though. Thirty-nine percent want four or more, and 49% want at least three, even though in most cases that’s more than they need on a regular basis for sleeping.
What would they do with the extra rooms? The most common response (79%) was that they would be used as standby space for guests. Two-thirds said they had home offices or study rooms in mind. Indeed, nearly half the respondents said they used a separate room in their homes as office space, despite the fact that 31% of those who had home offices said they never worked in them.
To gauge what home buyers want most in a new home, respondents were asked to rate more than 90 designs and features in 10 categories. Among the 10 rated most essential, half were exterior items such as exterior lighting, trees, a rear deck, and a fenced yard.
Inside, most important were a laundry room, bathroom exhaust fans, dining room, bathroom linen closet and double-pane windows.
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Lew Sichelman is a syndicated real estate columnist. He can be contacted via e-mail at LSichelman@aol.com.
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Distributed by United Feature Syndicate.
