Some Would-Be Buyers Have Given Up Survey Estimates 1 in 3 Could Wait a Year or More By Lew Sichelman | Special to Banker & Tradesman | Mar 14, 2021 | Reprints | Print
Stephanie Visscher is still in the game. But she is pulling her hair out.
Along with her boyfriend, the Denver public relations counselor has been looking for a house since early January, to no avail. Inventory is so scarce where she wants to live, and competition so stiff, that she hasn’t even had a chance to make an offer.
“It’s definitely been tempting to give up,” Visscher told me. “Everyone said you have to make compromises on your first home, but there’s nothing to compromise on. When I have gone to showings, it’s crazy.”
Health and Wellness Become Top of Mind for New-Home Builders and Buyers builderonline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from builderonline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
WASHINGTON After declining for four years, a number of key trends including the average size of the home and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms reversed course in 2020 as a result of shifting buyer preferences in response to COVID-19.
The average size home remained flat at 2,486 square feet, while the percentage of homes with four or more bedrooms and three or more bathrooms rose to 46% and 33%, respectively, rising closer to 2015 peaks, according to information from the National Association of Home Builders presented during the recent International Builders' Show, held virtually.
The Atlantic
Welcome to the Post-pandemic Dream Home
Work “nooks,” sanitizer-stocked mudrooms, and other new features might soon appear in American houses for those who can afford them.
Updated at 6:19 p.m. ET on February 9, 2021.
With all the additional time Americans are spending at home, the pandemic has made many people hyperaware of what they like and what they don’t about the space they live in: Natural light went from being a perk to a lifeline; an open-concept floor plan went from being an occasional annoyance to an exasperating privacy killer. Sometime hopefully not long from now, though, the threat of the pandemic will lift and homes will go back to being just one place among many where people spend a great deal of time. What will they have learned about what they want from their living space?
Are Low Rates Enough to Offset Rising Prices? Builders Say Yes Feb 8 2021, 11:18AM
Even
with the accelerating pace of home price increases, the National Association of
Home Builders (NAHB) still sees homes
remaining affordable. The NAHB/Wells
Fargo Housing Opportunity Index for the fourth quarter of 2020 shows that affordability
remained steady during the quarter as
record-low mortgage rates offset record-high
home prices. NAHB analyst Rose Quint writes in the
Eye on Housing blog
however, that regulatory and supply-side
challenges threaten to aggravate affordability problems in the year ahead.
Quint says that, nationally, 58.3
percent of all homes, new and existing, that sold during the quarter were