The home of your wife’s dreams?
Experience has taught me women tend to call the shots in the home buying process. If you’re in the industry, I’m sure that’s your experience as well.
This is why many of us implicitly market homes for women, highlighting the features that we think appeal to them.
But what exactly is it that female homebuyers want? Experience can certainly give you an idea. But valuable as it may be, experience is a subjective thing, especially when it’s not backed up by studies.
Thankfully, according to Builder Magazine, two U.S. builders made it a point to narrow down the factors that make female homebuyers tick, going so far as to take women-centric design studies.
They seem to have succeeded — one of them, Patcon Construction, continued to sell homes in new Hampshire and Maine even as its competitors couldn’t, while the other, Hugh A. Fisher of Deer Brook Development Corp., quadrupled his business in the middle of the U.S. housing recession.
Ironically perhaps, their findings not just confirm many a builder’s experience, but also a few gender stereotypes. For example, when men look at a floorplan they think about how they will relax in the house, while women focus on how the family will live in the house and how they will work in it.
Women also tend to focus on organizing, having convenient access to laundry rooms, and making sure their husbands have a place where they can drop their wallet and keys (which apparently they don’t want us dropping on the kitchen counter).
Read the article here, or check out this survey, which helps women find the type of floorplan that best suits their personality.
Have you ever marketed homes explicitly for women? What’s your take on all this?
JohnAmardeil.com 