The pace of change in the American home is expected to accelerate dramatically in the next several years, according to 60 NAHB interviews with some 500 architects, designers, manufacturers and marketing experts asking them about what they expect to be prevalent in average and upscale homes in 2015.
The big news is that single-family homes are expected to end the growth spurt that has persisted, with some cyclical interruptions, since 1973.
“We don’t think the size will rise anymore,” Gopal Ahluwalia, NAHB’s vice president for research, told an audience at the International Builders’ Show in Orlando, Fla. earlier this month.
The high cost of housing has forced consumers to start making trade-offs, and higher quality is trumping additional space, Ahluwalia said. The new single-family homes that were completed during the first three quarters of last year had floor areas averaging 2,459 square-feet, he said, up from about 1,500 square feet in 1973.
The consensus of the professionals who were polled by NAHB was that home size would slip into the 2,300 to 2,500-square-foot range by 2015.
However, compounding the picture are projected changes in the composition of the U.S. population that favor ethnic groups who tend to have larger households. Compared to a 2.8% increase in the white population between 2000 and 2010 and a 2.4% increase by that group from 2010 to 2020, Hispanics are poised to grow by 34.1% and 25.1%, respectively, during those periods, and Asians by 33.3% and 26.3%. In 2015, Census Bureau projections show an average 2.46 persons per white household, compared to 3.36-person Hispanic homes and 3.45 in Asian domiciles.
What they have been losing in square footage, however, home buyers have been getting back in volume, and higher ceilings are here to stay, according to the survey findings.
Forty percent of those participating in the research said they expected changes in homes to be more significant or greater in the next decade than they were in the past 10 years and 41% indicated that they would be about the same. Among the issues they said would bring these changes were accessibility for the aging baby-boom population, technological advancement, green construction materials and environmental concerns.
Click here for other findings of the Home of the Future Study.
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