What Are The Housing Needs For Boomers & Other Cohorts

Longtime marketer and home-building industry consultant John Martin has seen many housing cycles: good community development and design innovation, he says, have always been the path back. Can design innovation do it again? Demographics are changed. It is an open question as to what it is going to take to get Gen Xers, aged 34 to 46, to buy new homes. Often called the Baby Bust, this generation is followed by an equally unknown group of home buyers: Gen Y or Millenials. Better known are the Baby Boomers, who have shaped home building for each of the past four decades. As their nests empty and they attempt to move down, this large cohort is displaying a wide range of needs that can be met by home builders and developers, says Martin. “Many times, it will be old ideas that are made relevant again for a new group of buyers,” he adds. To robustly prove the point that market needs are going unmet, Martin in 2010 gathered a group of leading designers, architects, land planners, market researchers, and marketers to meet the needs of a ficticious couple in their late 50s, who would have purchased a home in Mahogany in 1996. And now their kids have grown and they want to move down. From the research this group conducted, there was a need for multi-generational housing across all ethnicities, not just those buyers in the Asian and Hispanic communities who have previously demonstrated an interest in features like dual master suites to keep an extended family under one roof. The new scenario — one that is being acted on in new communities by Lennar in Northern California and Florida — is a family with a divorced daughter and grandchild living at home along with an aging parent, all with needs for privacy and independence. The result is three distinct living spaces anchored by a multi-function great room. “The public home builders like to think big — lots of houses all at once — we’ve got to think small,” says Martin. “Building is no longer about producing houses for the mass market. The real opportunity is in the niches — building certain types of homes for certain types of people in neighborhoods that are unique and varied.”