Make Yourself at Home

Findings from four recent studies suggest that a significant portion of homebuyers, cutting across geographic regions and age cohorts, is dissatisfied with the available housing options, providing an opportunity for builders and developers to help redefine what “at-home” means.

IKEA’s “Life at Home Report 2018” considers place, space, relationships, and things that add up to “a new era” of feeling at home, concluding that, for many people, four walls can’t contain that feeling.

Identifying and creating the “at-home” feeling in a home’s design may prove useful for engaging target buyer groups, while situating a home within a given community and providing insights for how best to leverage its amenities with those of the community serves to help ensure and maintain buyer satisfaction after move-in.

In a similar report in 2016, 20 percent of IKEA’s survey respondents said they felt more at home in places other than their residence, indicating a need for nearby community, civic, and social outlets. The 2018 report, citing data from 22,000 respondents in 22 international markets, saw that sentiment grow to 35 percent for those living in urban markets.

Notably, a recent study of American Millennial buying preferences in the Journal of Planning Education and Research finds that group is more likely than older generations to buy their first homes in urban cores, supporting the argument that the largest home-buying generation still favors living in cities.

Overall, American homebuyer confidence is down, according to the most recent data from government-backed lender Fannie Mae, with 21 percent of buyers in October 2018 reporting that it was a good time to buy a home, versus 29 percent in the peak buying season last spring.