Steve Jobs liked to refer to personal computers as a "bicycle for the mind."
Human beings, he'd learned from poring over Scientific Americans and Heath Kits when he was a kid, unleashed tremendous locomotive power--even eclipsing the No. 1 master species of the contest, the condor--when they blended their energies with those of an efficient partner in locomotion, a two-wheeler. Only people can exponentially improve their ability to accomplish feats and solve problems with the use of tools they create, Jobs reasoned.
So, if we can relate to a PC as a bicycle for the mind, it may be helpful to start thinking about a home--or equally, a community--in a similar fashion, as a tool with which humans look to improve their ability to achieve well-being and the capacity to prosper.
As housing's market for demand begins to betray signs of stress amid rising mortgage interest rates, price increases, and the collateral impacts of tax reform on the deductibility of state and local and property taxes in high-priced housing markets, everyone's fixating on prices.
For builders, costs go up and squeeze harder on hard-fought margins. For would-be home buyers, costs to buy and borrow go up, putting more and more pressure on household incomes that aren't keeping pace. Now, and over the next five months, all of builders' ability to operate and build at a high level of efficiency and excellence will be put to a test as buyers collectively push back on rising prices, or simply capitulate and put their homeownership dreams off until another day.
Economics say builders should be building for a bigger universe to give more people access to decent, fair-priced housing. Instead, the universe shrinks.
Part of that--and materially important to the issue of housing affordability--is the meaning and value of what residential builders and developers offer people today. It's not simply about a buying price, rent equivalency, and a selling price at the exit point of an owner's ownership period.
A big part of the housing affordability issue is a marketing challenge the likes of which residential construction and development business community never had to face as intensely as it does now.
It's the challenge of meaningfully transforming what the dream and value of homeownership is--and this is possible because of the way homes are designed, and built, and how they live as they never have before, partly because of how people are changing how they live in homes.
As this occurs, buying a home and buying into a particular community can be offered by builders and developers as a tool for well-being and the ability to prosper, a bicycle--if you will--for the body, the soul, and the heart. This would make homeownership mean dramatically different things to a household than most builders and developers are marketing today, which is a beginning transaction, a period of appreciation based on location, and an end transaction.
Instead, new homes--especially the ones that perform at a high level with energy, water, and materials sustainability, the ones that are made up of materials to promote healthy living air and water filtration and purification, room comfort, lighting cadences during the day and night that match deep-seated circadian rhythms, indoor biophilic environments, noise reduction, and connectivity to the outdoors, and the ones that "live" as an elegant system of interoperating connections and protective mechanisms, blending the physical world with the cloud.
If a home functions this way, it becomes a tool human beings can use to improve their well-being by leaps and bounds. Homeownership becomes a hybrid product and service whose household "hires" to improve life, to make it saner, healthier, more fit for reality.
This becomes a challenge for marketers. They share accountability for turning the tide on what we know today as a crisis in housing affordability, because they must tell the story of how homes and their attainability are about more than a real estate deal. A home is a bicycle for the heart, soul, and body--offering sanctuary, resilient access to essential resources, and an outsized opportunity to prosper by interacting with the house structure and systems, and teaching them to be the place where well-being is protected, nurtured, and allowed to grow.
One day before too long, appraisers, lenders, and the flow of capital investment will hinge on more than first-cost based transactions and valuations. That's because developers and builders are at work now on homes that will transform the promise and dream of homeownership by truly melding physical property with intellectual property.
That's what KB Home, and an enormous, talent-rich team of partners, is working to reveal in January and February 2019, at the Inspirada masterplanned community near Las Vegas. It's KB Home ProjeKt, and it's #wheretomorrowlives.
