The home building industry is a schedule-driven one. Builders often find themselves taking a hit-the-ground-running approach and jumping straight into ideas that they know will work.
But builders must break must break their habits and routines and question the "what if's" in order to drive innovation, according to presenters at a recent TRI Pointe Group Design Summit.
One builder from Pardee Homes, a Las Vegas-based division of TRI Pointe Group, puts it this way: “We’ve never not sold a home because we put something weird or quirky in it. But we’ve definitely not sold a home because it was boring.”
The award-winning firm, which is one of the top builders in the nation and ranked 13th in our most recent BUILDER 100 list, brought together representatives from its six regional divisions, real estate consultants, and architects in Laguna Beach, Calif., last month for an interactive Design Summit to spur ideas about the creative process surrounding home building.
Builders from the six divisions, which include TRI Pointe Homes in California and Colorado, Maracay Homes in Arizona, Pardee Homes in California and Nevada, Quadrant Homes in Washington, Trendmaker Homes in Texas, and Winchester Homes in Maryland and Virginia, engaged in thought-provoking activities with landscape architects from Santa Ana, Calif.-based PlaceWorks, architects from Newport Beach, Calif.-based Bassenian Lagoni, and consultants from John Burns Real Estate Consulting, that centered around the wants and needs of today’s different buyer demographics, and how home design is the most influential factor in catering to those needs.
The summit raised a number of questions:-How do owners interact with their homes?
-Have American builders become lazy in designing functional spaces?
-How do builders know that introducing something new or “innovative” will be successful?
-And, perhaps most importantly, how does thoughtful design take a home to the next level?
What’s in a Home?
The summit kicked off with an exercise where each participant shared a photo of their favorite place and described why it was special. As photos of backyard patios and family vacation spots were presented, common themes started to emerge, inlcuding the home as a gathering space. A place to spend time with family members, friends, and loved ones (yes, that includes pets). Somewhere to watch your children grow. Somewhere to connect and make new memories. A place of comfort and retreat, where you could renew and refresh.
As Mollie Carmichael of John Burns Real Estate Consulting reflected, “no one talked about walls. They talked about experiences, and how their homes and spaces made them feel.”
Shouldn’t a home be a buyer's favorite place, one that creates these very experiences and emotional responses?
Thoughtful Design
According to research by John Burns Real Estate Consulting, buyers over age 50, who comprise the largest number of households and the highest percentage of U.S. new home shoppers, say they often can’t find what they’re looking for and don’t even want to move in the first place. So how do builders draw this demographic out of their current home and attract them with must-have features?
While location is the number one motivation to move, interior home design is the second, even above affordability, according to the consulting firm's research. Home buyers value functionality most when looking for a home, ranking style and function over size. They don’t mind a smaller home as long as that space is designed in a purposeful way. Owners value the intangibles, such as health, security, and comfort, and anecdotally, report that the thing that matters most to them is time—time spent with their families in a home that allows them to function efficiently and therefore gives them more time to focus on the things, and people, that matter most.
“You ask yourself, ‘what business are we in?' It’s not the construction business or the housing industry—home building is a retail business," said a division president at the summit. "We’re no different than a Nordstrom store, except that we provide consumers with the most important product they’ll ever buy.”
So how do builders design for that, for a product that's less about the physical shelter being constructed and much more about the lifestyle it offers? While builders and designers are aware of some consistently popular features that make a home attractive, such as outdoor entertainment areas, open floor plans, and integrated smart home technology, there really isn’t one answer for how to design the best space, especially across demographics and local markets. But the strategy behind figuring out how to get there can apply across the board.
Pause the Process
Taking time to stop, pause, and really think and talk about all the alternatives available is going to be how building teams create new ideas, new styles, new designs, and ultimately, new and better homes for their consumers.
Builders could keep constructing the same conventional homes from the 80s that do what they need to do, but that won’t set a company apart from the crowd. Good design is timeless, it grows with the homeowner, and for the builders at Tri Pointe, is the driving factor in adding value to a home for both builders and the customer. Know your demographic, know your market, and be willing to introduce new ideas into the scene even with a chance that you may have to get it wrong a time or two before you get it right.
As the summit closed with each regional team presenting a quick bit about their best practice for office work flow, an executive offered a simple push for going forward: "Be bold and take risks if you want to deliver the unexpected."
