How essential to young families is having a playroom for the
kids? Very. And some are giving up another long-held family feature to get them
— the sprawling backyard.
“Buyers today — especially millennial buyers — want everyone
to have a private space of their own to decompress under one roof, and the
bonus room/playroom outweighs a large yard in their buying decision,” said
Patty Blackwelder, a buyer’s agent with Twins Selling Real Estate in Northern
Virginia. “The first item that seems to fall off the list is the large yard.”
It was a formal living room repurposed into a playroom that
recently swayed clients of hers to purchase a home in Bristow, Va. Gone were
the typical sitting chairs and end tables, replaced by shelving for toys,
blackboard paint and a Dr. Seuss quote printed on a wall.
While the home has a yard, it’s small. No matter; since
moving in, the buyers have been taking their children to a nearby playground
anyway, Blackwelder said.
The biggest requirements for families with children,
according to the National Association of Realtors, is what you’d expect: 62% of
those with kids 18 and under say the quality of the neighborhood is important,
while 50% are looking for a good school district and 49% want the home to be
convenient to their jobs. Fewer said that lot size or proximity to parks and
recreational facilities were a factor in choosing a home. The statistics come
from the group’s 2015 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers report.
Yet once those top-level needs are met, families start to
make more detail-level compromises when choosing their homes. And being able to
visualize a place for the kids to corral their stuff and play has become a
priority, according to Blackwelder and others.
In the San Francisco area, Ann Thompson, regional sales
executive at Bank of America Home Loans, is seeing the same thing. Indoor play
space was a top desire for buyers in 2015, she said.
“People are happy to have a patio for the kids to play on.
The big yard thing — it’s not necessarily everyone’s grandest dream anymore,”
Thompson said. That may be especially true in California, where water shortages
— and restrictions on water usage — influence how much lawn people want. Many
owners also don’t want to spend the time or the money required to keep up a
large lawn, she said.
That isn’t to say that a large backyard doesn’t remain a
priority for some buyers, in some locations. In Kansas City, for one, families
don’t seem to be interested in downsizing lawns, said Sherri Hines, a
real-estate agent with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, Kansas City Homes.
“We are so used to space and land, we don’t have houses
right on top of each other, we are very spread out geographically,” she said.
“And I don’t see that diminishing.” Home prices are also generally more
affordable there than in markets on the coasts, and home buyers may not need to
compromise as much as in high-cost areas.
But in the Kansas City area, too, an indoor play area is a
priority, she said, since parents want a separate space to keep the toys from
flooding the kitchen and family areas, Hines said.
“The volume of toys we have is much higher [than in
generations past],” she said.
New life for the
dining room
Millennials, in particular, are good at repurposing home
spaces so that they’re more useful to the way we live today, said Jill Waage,
executive editor for the Better Homes and Gardens brand. The brand includes the
print magazine from which it gets its name and also includes its website,
social platforms, apps, broadcast programs and licensed products. For years
now, formal spaces such as dining rooms have been out of favor with many home
buyers.
“They are willing to look at the renaming and reuse of the
home,” she said, changing rooms “into something that they get value out of
every day and every week.”
Retailers are also suggesting the dual-use room as a trend.
On the website for Land of Nod, a retailer of children’s furniture
and products, there are tips on how to create a formal dining room and playroom
in one.
“Just because at some point in time someone wrote ‘dining
room’ over this square plot in your home, doesn’t mean that it can only forever
and henceforth be used as a dining room,” it reads, adding that often this
formal room is used only several days a year for gatherings. “We say you can
have your dining room four days a year, but you can also have a playroom 361
days a year.”
Size of the yard may
not matter
Families still want some sort of backyard, but it doesn’t
have to be huge, Blackwelder said. Many times it’s enough to have room for
outdoor living features, such as dining areas and fire pits. Gardens and edible
landscaping are also popular, Waage said.
And for the kids, a small lawn — perhaps to place a swing
set on — may do just fine, Blackwelder said.
Gone are the days — for many families — when the kids head
out the backdoor and play in the yard unsupervised, Blackwelder said. They
probably wouldn’t want to, anyway, often preferring to play at a park (with
parental supervision) or, in the case of her own family, out near the
cul-de-sac in front of the house, where other neighborhood kids would gather
and she could watch her kids from the front steps.
Home buyers typically consider their budgets, wishes, wants
and needs, then make compromises to settle on their best home choice for their
family, she said.
“What’s interesting is, given the choice of a large backyard
or space inside for everyone, they will take the smaller backyard and space for
everyone. Even if the house is on a main road, they will take that, as long as
a playground is nearby,” Blackwelder said.
Article Courtesy of Realtor.com
No comments:
Post a Comment