Monthly Archives: January 2016

When the dining room turns into a play room, you know the kids are in charge

Parents are forgoing back yards and even living rooms to carve out space for the toys

How essential to young families is having a playroom for the kids? Very. And some are giving up another longtime family favorite 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/EXIT Realty Associates 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 Blackwelder’s 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 quotation 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. 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 persistent drought — and restrictions on water usage — influence how much lawn people desire. 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.” Housing is also generally more affordable there than, for example, 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, Hines said, since parents want a separate space to keep toys from flooding the kitchen and family areas. “The volume of toys we have is much higher [than in generations past],” she observed.

New life for the dining room
Millennials, in particular, are good at repurposing home spaces so that they’re more aligned with life 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 Chicago-based 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 a formal dining room is used only a few 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.”

Courtesy of: Amy Hoak – MarketWatch

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5 Huge Mistakes People Make Furnishing Their New Home

Hey, we know: Moving into a new home is exciting. Like, obsess over decor blogs and catalogs, binge-watch HGTV for eight-hour stretches, find ways to interject phrases like “open kitchen shelving” into everyday conversations exciting. So it’s understandable that you’re dying to start filling every corner with stuff as soon as you’ve unpacked your last box. Beware: Time and again, interior designers see overeager new homeowners make the same mistakes when furnishing their home. Big mistakes! Take heed and tread carefully into your new space.

Mistake No. 1: Buying everything at once
Of course, you want to make those empty rooms look like home, sweet home, pronto. So you whip out your laptop and go on a mad room-by-room shopping spree for every stick of furniture from coffee tables to your canopy bed.

But Mark Clement of MyFixItUpLife.com urges a completely different strategy: “Stop, sit down, get out a piece of paper, and plan.” Great decorating, he says, is about taking your time to think through the rooms. Make a list of what you need to furnish the whole house; then focus first on the two to three most important rooms—generally the more exposed parts of the house such as living room, kitchen, and family room. From there, proceed at a pace where you’re certain you love (or at least deeply like) each purchase you make.

It really is OK to take up to a year to decorate a new home. You’re going to be living there for a while, remember?

Mistake No. 2: Decorating around a legacy piece
It might be your mother’s armoire or that overstuffed chair your husband bought when he was still single, or maybe it’s a bookshelf you paid a ton of money for and wouldn’t consider tossing. Regardless, trying to decorate around some of these pieces will only cause you grief. Odds are they’ll push you into a certain layout or color scheme—even one that might be completely wrong for you or your new home.

I’ve personally been saddled with two wide, black Barcelona chairs for the past decade, creating a living room motif that is simply too dark and cluttered for the space. (Welcome to my pain.) What I should have done, according to experts, is place them in a different context (a bedroom, perhaps), sold them, or put them out on the street. Hello, Goodwill?

Mistake No. 3: Trusting your ‘eye’ rather than a tape measure
Professionals know that measuring accurately is a critical step in design.

“Measuring a space is imperative before you purchase anything,” saysHomepolish designer Will Saks. It’s not just a question of whether a piece of furniture will fit, but how it will look sitting there. “You need to understand the dimensions of a space so the scale will feel balanced,” Saks adds.

Everything needs to be proportionate to the architecture of the room. “While a large, overstuffed Chesterfield might look great in the store, in a tiny apartment it might end up looking like a fat guy in a little coat,” says Saks.

And always remember to measure doorways and hallways before purchasing large pieces. There are few things more soul-crushing (or, for the delivery guys, more backbreaking) than lugging a sofa up six flights of stairs only to discover it doesn’t fit through the doorway. Most companies will give you the minimum clearance you need for delivery, but it’s up to you to ensure that it will truly fit. In most cases, it’s the height of a sofa that is the key measurement, not the width or depth.

Mistake No. 4: Cramming rooms like a clown car
Take a deep breath: It’s OK to have some empty spaces and walls. You want to be able to move around freely without having to hurdle a cocktail ottoman. Granted, while Saks maintains that “how much furniture you decide to put in a space is completely dependent on the aesthetic you want to achieve,” if you’re going for a more sleek look, stick to a few key pieces in a room to create the feeling of openness. The same goes for artwork—one large frame can create an art gallery feeling.

Mistake No. 5: Looking like a page from a catalog or decor mag
Ah, it all looks so great in print, but in your home, it’s a different story.

“I know it’s tempting to want to buy everything all at once and from the same place—those catalogs and stores are styled so well,” says Saks. “But refrain from doing so. To me, the most interesting designs are the ones that are aesthetically mixed.”

His tips: Incorporate vintage or one-of-a-kind pieces into your space to make it feel personal and curated. Pair that spanking new sofa with a beautiful, vintage credenza. Shop for accessories and artwork on Etsy and at flea markets so that your home feels unique. Because as nice as catalogs look, ask yourself this: Do they look like a home? Like your home?

Courtesy of:

Rosie Amodio is a writer/editor who has written for brands such as Self, InStyle, Wetpaint, and The Nest. A native New Yorker, Rosie is obsessed with NYC real estate, though she dreams of living on the beach in Southern California

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A big change could be about to come to the housing market

Jonathan Marino and Andy Kiersz
Dec. 26, 2015, 8:44 AM

The Federal Reserve has finally lifted interest rates from 0% and after nine years without a rate hike.

The potential ramifications of the policy move are far-reaching and span various American industries, from automakers to homebuilders to investment banks.

But those impacts may be disparate.

Typically, rising interest rates make for a more difficult borrowing environment. That has the potential to slow home sales, which impacts US banks, as well as new starts, which will hurt homebuilders.

With the Fed’s rate hike, history shows homes starts have tended toward a decline, which will inevitably hurt homebuilders. When rates get higher, building new homes is usually a less attractive prospect.

“Homebuilding stocks are typically losers from an absolute and relative standpoint during tightening cycles,” according to a separate Credit Suisse note from December 15. “Historically homebuilding stocks under performed the S&P 500 during each of the past six Fed tightening cycles.”

For years after the Federal Reserve’s decision to back down interest rates to 0%, a badly beaten homebuilding sector saw gradual increases in both homes starts and permits. They never rose to the pre-crisis levels, but the period that led up to this was in part fueled by an unprecedented boom in lending to many unqualified borrowers.

Yet it is debatable on Wall Street whether the average consumer’s psyche is far less tethered to the behavior of US central bankers than, say, that of a Wall Street executive.

“If we do see some rate increases coming, because it reflects a stronger economy, nobody is going to not buy a house because the mortgage rates went up,” Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf said the Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference earlier this month. “They can choose a different product and probably get the same rate. The same thing is true for small businesses.”

But Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan doesn’t agree with Stumpf.

“If you see rates rise, you’ll see the mortgage market slow down,” Moynihan said at same event earlier this month, before the Federal Reserve raised rates.

At still the same event, Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman noted that most interest-rate hikes have typically resulted in an uptick in home prices.

“Twenty-five out of 26 times when interest rates went up, home prices went up,” Schwarzman said.

If that is indeed the case, homebuilders may be better building more and aiming to make it up on margin. Even at the end of 2016, interest rates are expected to remain near record lows for the last half-century.

It’s a great time to buy a home.

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