Transcript
Dean Wehrli:
Welcome back to another episode of New Home Insights. Today we’re going to be talking to Steve Burch, senior vice president here at John Burns Consultants. Steve say hi.
Steve Burch:
Good morning everybody.
Dean Wehrli:
Today Steve and I are actually going to delve into our vault of consumer preferences from our Consumer Insights survey that we do every year. In this case, this survey is administered to thousands of folks across the country. This year we had over 23,000 respondents from across the nation and these are all home shoppers. So these are the folks that you want to generalize to and you want to tap into those preferences and see what works and what doesn’t it. Steve you want to talk anything about the survey here?
Steve Burch:
Sounds good man. That sounds good. We had 23,720 people that responded to it and 37 partners, both builders and developers that work with us on this thing.
Dean Wehrli:
Nice. Nice. So this is great data, and we’ll come back to this multiple times. Today we’re going to talk about masterplan amenities specifically. In fact, this is the first part of a two parter. The second part, we will have a master plan guru, Ken Perlman talking about what he’s seen in masterplan that works on the ground in terms of amenities, what kind of amenities have worked. Today with Steve we’re going to talk about what consumers have expressed that they want to see, what works, what doesn’t work, what kind of differences are we seeing. So Steve, let’s get into it. Let’s get into it with maybe the most obvious question, which is, what are the core amenities that people want in a master plan? What are the must-haves right now?
Steve Burch:
So when we talk to people about their communities one of the dominant trends that we came up with this year is health and fitness. That’s really on people’s mind. That’s what they’re thinking about a lot. So walking paths and trails are by far and away the most popular amenity in community. Here’s an interesting thing, I know that developers looked really hard at the big land-eating amenities that they could put in and so we asked about, “Would you prefer to have a big centralized park, with maybe some sports fields in it and those kinds of things?” And the majority of our shoppers are much more interested in pocket parks throughout the community as opposed to a big centralized park.
Dean Wehrli:
Okay. So how about the, who? How do we differ in these? I can see older buyers and the social interaction, we know, is really key. What are some ways, by region, by part of the metropolitan area, outlying versus suburban versus in town, by age, by whatever. How do we differ in terms of our preferences for masterplan amenities?
Steve Burch:
Well that’s, that’s a very interesting thing and sometimes the differences we find are pretty obvious but it’s good to have quantification and a backup forum. So we took a hard look at pool preferences, how people want the pools set up. And not terribly surprising, but older adults, similar to our young adults, so where kids are not a factor, are much more interested in heart exercise pools, lap pools, and even resort-oriented pools for socialization with places to chat and meet and talk and stuff like that. For young adults, for young families with kids, the attention, obviously and logically, shifts to more community-oriented pools, splash pads for the kids. All kinds of things to keep the kids interested and active. So it’s a bit of an obvious difference, but it’s an important one to know about and it stresses the importance of targeting as you go in for setting up these communities. Are you going to be dealing more with families? Are you going to be dealing with non-family groups?
Dean Wehrli:
Yeah. You have to know your buyer profile going in. And actually that’s one of the ways the consumer can help you. You know your buyer profile, you’ve got to be able to hit them and hit with what they want. So let’s go to, we’ll be a little delicate here, this is preferences, you don’t have to cite any specific examples of course. What are the must–not-haves or at least the classic amenities that maybe we see a lot of that is their popularity is waning, or they really aren’t that heavily preferred?
Steve Burch:
Well, I kind of hate to do this because this is kind of the end of the cycle, right? But the first thing that popped out at me is the lack of interest for either a nine hole or an 18 hole golf course within the community. So there’s a little bit of an uptick of an interest among active adults and empty nesters, but boy it is not that big a deal, not significant. And then among those that do want a golf course, most of them would prefer it to be fairly close to their community, not inside of the community. So again, we don’t need to eat up this much land inside the community and then pay for all the maintenance of a golf course. I can drive to one nearby. So golf courses, they usually-
Dean Wehrli:
And you’re going to lose money anyway, so you don’t want to be part of that.
Steve Burch:
Exactly.
Dean Wehrli:
So golf seem though to wax and wane with Tiger, didn’t it? It surged in sudden popularity with Tiger, he faded away and it’s kind of tanked, although I’m joking, I think that’s been going on for 30 years.
Steve Burch:
Yeah, and watch your local market. Sometimes a trend will pick up in a local market that;ll be very interesting. I know that when I was working in Atlanta, there was a lot of interest in community tennis clubs for the kids or even for the adults. And so that that picked up some interest, but generally speaking across the country, we don’t see that much interest in the tennis until you get to the pickleball stage, then you can-
Dean Wehrli:
That’s a good point. So, I read somewhere recently that pickleball has kind of lost steam in the active adult world. For a while it seemed like pickleball was literally a must-have. Is that not true anymore?
Steve Burch:
Absolutely, it was a must-have, plus you had to seats so people could watch other people play it. Yeah.
Dean Wehrli:
Yeah. Which, by the way, sounds fascinating.
Steve Burch:
Yeah exactly.
Dean Wehrli:
Why is pickleball not on ESPN? I’m confused.
Steve Burch:
Exactly. An Olympic sport for crying out loud.
Dean Wehrli:
So it’s funny you do have to balance being faddish versus being stale, don’t you? If something that seems like it’s surging, is it just a temporary fad or is it something you need to really switch to? But if you don’t follow fads, do you become stale? Do you get old? It’s a tough balance, isn’t it?
Steve Burch:
Yeah, it really is, especially for, you might call them hardwired amenities, right? So you literally have to have a hard surface for either pickleball or tennis. So if you make that commitment, you’ve got to hope that that amenities stays interesting to the prospective buyers and then ultimately, someday, to the resale buyers in that community.
Dean Wehrli:
Yeah. Good point. Good point. What else? Anything else that you tested and it doesn’t have much of an appeal?
Steve Burch:
No, those were really the big things that really struck my attention, especially the golf thing. And I know we’re at the end of the cycle, I hate to pile on, but it’s just something that people are not clamoring for inside of their community.
Dean Wehrli:
Honestly, I think we’re at the end of the golf cycle, the 400 year golf cycle. It’s done. You can tell I hate golf, okay. I’m letting my bias show through there, I apologize. Okay, so now here is your crystal ball Steve, you ready? You put on your see-er hat. What do you think we are going to see in terms of masterplan amenities down the road? What might draw interest in the future?
Steve Burch:
Okay, so we talked a little bit about socializing events and the things that makes the community less sterile and more interactive, but there’s also an opportunity, I think, for some servicing. So we’ve been doing some research lately and looking at the whole issue of delivery receiving services, and unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve got to realize how fast the online ordering is going and then what’s growing along with it is the potential for faster misappropriation in your packages at your door. So delivery receiving service is gaining popularity. It’s not over the majority yet, but a number of people are starting to think about that and what they’re really thinking about is a delivery service for the stuff that they ordered online, especially the stuff that’s rather expensive. So you order a new phone and it gets delivered. Well if you’re not there for most of the day and you come in later, is there a place that you can deliver it? So one of the things that communities could consider that wouldn’t be terribly out of line is a set of lockers, not unlike the FedEx lockers or the UPS lockers and stuff like that so they can get their deliveries safely maintained until they get there.
Dean Wehrli:
I know the survey, our data is to new home shoppers, but we’re seeing that in the luxury apartment world already, where they have those. We just came across it, I want to say it was a five, six-year-old apartment building and they were already redoing and enlarging their locker space for exactly that reason. They were doubling the size of the locker space and I think they were getting rid of some little meeting room or something like that to create more of this locker space for folks who would get their package and get a text that it’s there. Yeah, that’s a great idea. So you see that happening in the for sale masterplan world?
Steve Burch:
Yes, exactly. And that’s a logical application for it because it can be centralized and then two things would happen. The delivery service trucks wouldn’t be zipping all over your neighborhood and it would be easier for them to make a handful of deliveries to one centralized place. I mean, a lot of good things would happen if we can find some space and devote some space to a secure delivery receiving system of some sort.
Dean Wehrli:
Yeah, no, I like that. That’s good. What else? What else? What else might happen out there?
Steve Burch:
More than half of our respondents work at least one day a week from home. And so that has some obvious implications for the house itself, right? You need an office, probably want an office with a door, some of the design characteristics of building a nice office into the home is certainly an obvious thing, but what about a business center in the community somewhere that could handle large printing projects, a separate place to go and do shipping and receiving and that kind of stuff. So the rest of the office features that one probably wouldn’t put in their home office could you provide it in community? It might be a really popular, it might be a surprisingly popular activity.
Dean Wehrli:
How about meeting space, would you-
Steve Burch:
Absolutely. As a person that works at home, I’m sensitive to this and there’s been times that I wanted to bring my team to Phoenix and have a meeting with them and I’d almost have to do it at an airport in a conference room or somewhere else. Yeah, a meeting space would be a terrific idea.
Dean Wehrli:
Yeah. Not every meeting can be at Starbucks when you’re home officing. Most of them, yes, but not all of them. So, yeah, that’s a good idea. I like that. So business centers for all those home officers and also of course accommodating those home officers in their floor plans. What else is out there in the future?
Steve Burch:
So the last thing I was thinking about in thinking about it at some length with this whole idea of the movement to humanize our communities and have more social interaction and social events. And I could see that becoming a considerably more important element of a community, almost one that would be leverageable in a marketing sense. That this is a community with a real sense of community. So we are doing things maybe on a quarterly basis. I love the notion of thinking of, of HOAs adding a social component. So they’re regulatory and they take care of all the common areas, all that kind of stuff, very, very important, but what about adding a social element to it? So on a quarterly basis we put together a community barbecue, a community car show, concert in the park, something like that. Not a huge issue and doesn’t take too much more hard amenities space, but it’s something that suddenly can render a community a lot more livable and a lot more fun.
Dean Wehrli:
Every community needs a cruise director. I’m not going to date myself, by making a Love Boat reference, although I could. And you would get it and I would get it and I think some of our listeners would get it. So that’s great. This is good stuff, Steve. Let’s recap real quick here for what we talked about. So we talked about masterplan amenities and preferences from the consumer survey that Steve mentioned, almost 24,000 people responded to nationwide. In terms of the must-haves, we talked about health and fitness and trails and things like that. Just that activity, people want to lead an active lifestyle of all ages, so having those things that maintain that activity is critical. We like separate bike paths, just even if they’re internal or even external bike paths for the younger and more adventurous, although buyers want to see those bike paths threaded through. I’ve even seen some where you see kind of a tri path environment, for walking, jogging or and then bikes.
Dean Wehrli:
And in terms of the who wants what, the older folks like the lap pools and that resort orientation, love the socialization and the social interaction. Families are more about the splash pads and the activities.
Dean Wehrli:
In terms of the what must-not-have, at least what is starting to wane in popularity, it’s golf. I say that with glee in my voice, and be careful of those niche amenities, the skateboard park, the equestrian, and things like that, that have comparatively limited appeal, and masterplans need to reach that broad-based appeal. That’s tougher with those niche things. But there is this balance between being stale and just following fads, so it’s not easy.
Dean Wehrli:
And then finally we talked about what might happen in the future and Steve mentioned that servicing is all about service, all about online ordering. And let’s accommodate folks who work from home. I agree. I think we’re going to see that be more and more the norm.
Dean Wehrli:
And then finally, social interaction has long been a big thing in masterplans, but more of it, more often, that’s the kind of thing people want to see in their communities. Steve, anything you want to add for last words?
Steve Burch:
No, this has been a blast. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Dean Wehrli:
We did too and I hope you did, too. Listeners, please join us next time on New Home Insights when, as I mentioned, we’re going to talk to Ken Perlman and we’re going to again cover masterplan amenities, but we’re going to do that from the perspective of some hard examples on the ground, what Ken’s seen in his travels across the country of what’s worked and maybe what’s not worked. So, see you next time.
