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Technology | | Homebuyer Preferences
What Do Buyers Want?
A NAHB survey fills you in the amenities and features that will make buyers beg for more.
BY CHRIS LEPORINI
Understanding buyer preferences can help you formulate selling prices, select which features to emphasize during showings, and suggest potential home improvements that sellers could make to make homes more appealing. Although its principal audience is developers, the National Association of Home Builders’ book What 21st Century Homebuyers Want: A Survey of Customer Preferences (Homebuilder Press, $160.00 for non-members, 2002.) provides a peek into buyers’ minds. To decide what buyers want, the group solicited a poll of 3,000 households that had either bought a home in the past two years or planned to buy on in the next two years. The results provide a valuable overview of buyer preferences, yielding information ranging from the prices that they are willing to pay to the conveniences they can’t live without.
In Chapter 7, “Design and Features That Affect the Purchase Decision,” respondents placed 89 different characteristics, products, and features into one of four categories: do not want, indifferent, desirable, or essential/must have. The book ranked the top items according to how many desirable and essential/must have votes they received. A laundry room topped the list, followed by linen closets, a bathroom exhaust fan, and a dining room. Outdoor features—such as front porches, exterior lights, back decks, and fenced in yards—garnered an honorable mention, the book reports.
The outdoor features’ popularity is notable because they are easy to add at a later time. Expanding kitchen space might require a buyer to knock out a wall or two with a sledgehammer, but fencing in a yard is a much less difficult proposition. Salespeople can use the book to help buyers visualize potential home improvements, such as carpeting or ceiling fans, that could turn a “maybe” house into a dream home. Sometimes, a buyer can’t afford every extra that they desire. For instance, the survey found that to hold down costs, over half of respondents say that they would prefer to have unfinished space (such as a basement) that they could finish later.
Chapter 10, “Trade-Offs” carries this theme of balancing cost and amenities further with head-to-head comparisons of features. It asks questions such as “Would respondents prefer a larger than average kitchen space and smaller living area spaces or typical kitchen and living spaces?” Though buyers enjoy kitchen space, the majority, two-thirds, would rather not sacrifice their other living space.
Written in a reader-friendly, accessible format with lots of charts, graphs, bullets, and percentages, the book makes it easy to pinpoint buyers’ favorite amenities, features, and layouts. Knowing buyers’ preferences helps keep you ahead of the curve--rather than guessing what buyers want, you can call attention to features that you know are popular.
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