Skip To Content

Home Buyers Reveal the Top 5 Things They Want in a Home in 2021

Home Buyers Reveal the Top 5 Things They Want in a Home

Location, Location, Location

First and foremost, location is the most important feature of any home. Location isn’t just the geographic coordinates on a map or commuting time, it’s the all-encompassing offerings of the community… and those are constantly changing. Today, people prefer areas with high mobility and accessibility, convenient amenities, and plenty of recreation opportunities. Think about how many more local distilleries, skate parks, electric bike stores, coffee shops, microbreweries, and farmers’ markets you now have within a short drive vs how many fewer video rental stores or appliance-specific stores there are. Staying involved in your community to ensure that it is building an economy, infrastructure, amenities, and community spaces that current and future buyers are looking for is more important than ever as the world changes rapidly around us, and you CAN make a difference.

Low Maintenance, High Quality

The buyers of today and tomorrow want low-maintenance homes. From materials to appliances, millennials will tell you that there are a lot of “unknown unknowns” when it comes to maintenance. They’re even taking “adulting” classes to learn (and kudos to them for making the effort!), but many don’t know where to start and they don’t want to get caught in a knowledge gap with only YouTube to guide them. Folks looking to age in place also don’t want to deal with regular maintenance. Upgrading your home with low-maintenance materials and high-quality appliances is a clear way to stand out among the competition. Outfitting your home with long-lasting low-maintenance materials like fiber cement or vinyl siding, a metal roof, vinyl composite decking, and aluminum or vinyl windows (with long-lasting warranties) will give buyers a sense of comfort knowing that they won’t have to regularly paint, seal, or replace anything major for a long time. Other improvements like gutter guards, preventative drainage systems, and low maintenance lawns will help build your home’s brand as low maintenance.

A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place

According to Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, the number 1 most important capability for success is focus. Having a connected home is one thing, having a private and separate space to do every separate activity with focus is another. Who wants to hear someone lifting weights while you are on your super important Zoom presentation? Nobody! Today’s buyers are looking for homes with as much space as they can afford with specific private spaces to get the highest quality out of their time.

Convenience and Notification Technologies

We live in a time of dramatic change. Technology is simplifying and improving our quality of life. While we don’t yet have our own Jetsonian Rosie the Robot to do our bidding, so much manual maintenance and guesswork is being removed from our daily lives. We have smart ovens and smart thermometers that can cook your food to absolute perfection, robotic vacuum cleaners, smart lights that can remove blue light at night and also wake you up in the morning, video doorbells that can alert us of package deliveries, washers and dryers that automatically adjust themselves, and much more. Outfitting your home with smart appliances and technologies will help your home stand out. It is a good idea to stay away from outfitting your home with too much permanent tech like whole-house built-in systems (unless they are super easy to use and have evergreen capabilities), as technology is changing so rapidly that it could become outdated pretty quickly – when possible, choose options that are easy to change out when better technology is available.

The New Basic Need: Ultra-Fast Internet

Working from home, schooling from home, connected-exercising from home, digital health and wellness appointments, connected gaming, and streaming entertainment all have one thing in common – the Internet. Without ultrafast high-speed affordable Internet, engaging in any of these activities simultaneously in high quality is nearly impossible. Just like running water and electricity, buyers are now requiring ultra-fast high-speed Internet. It won’t be too long before satellite Internet providers like Starlink can provide ultra-fast connections everywhere, but we certainly are not to that point yet.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

;