02 Aug Generational Housing Desires

A recent study asked 1,000 Americans to list the features of their dream home. All ages were polled including Gen-y, Gen-X, and Boomers. You can read about it here.

The article talks about each generation and what they desire in a dream home. It also offers an explanation as to why they chose these in relation to their stereotypical personality traits. Instead of focusing on the stereotypes, I think the more useful information comes from each generation’s life stage. For example, Gen-Y is young and mostly single. This is the major contributor to their desire for a home to be a social hub.

Then you have Gen-X who wants more family-focused features in their homes. I think saying their lack of desire for luxury or formality is because of their generation traits is a stretch. As the article notes many Generation-X are child bearing at the moment. They are looking for organization and means to control the chaos.

The Baby Boomers are described as the patient group finally getting their private home retreat as they become empty nesters. The problem with this outlook is that most baby boomers will not be retiring in this manner. I understand that the poll asked respondents about their dream homes and not their reality homes. It makes me wonder how accurate some of this information is. No where in the article do they talk about the hurting economy, a damaged housing market, or the toned down retirement life ahead. It would be hard for me to take this information and design a product for baby boomers as it doesn’t seem to take current economics into consideration.

This study is very interesting but I am not sure if we need to be using it to plan our next development like it suggests. I would take a lot of advice into consideration along with this input.