Tag Archives: luxury goods

Do not dream of McMansions; picture really large houses and properties

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Architectural Digest features images of 12 “extra-large properties.” Here is the introduction:

Photo by Ingo Joseph on Pexels.com

There are few fantasies more persuasive or alluring than that of the expansive estate. When you think of big houses, your mind may immediately jump to the McMansions of yore, those garish homes you’d expect to see on an episode of MTV Cribs. The ones we can’t stop daydreaming about more closely resemble graceful, though still boldly luxurious, homes like the central property of Downton Abbey or the setting of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies before the horror film took a dark turn. Below we highlight 12 properties featured in AD that contain enviable amenities, from indoor tennis courts and home spas to guest houses and verdant gardens. 

Three features of this that struck me:

  1. Dreaming of McMansions exhibits poor taste. Dream bigger, more refined. Do not settle for the garish cookie-cutter version of a big house.
  2. The scale of these homes goes beyond the McMansion in numerous key ways. They are often far beyond the 3,000-5,000 square feet of a suburban McMansion. Some have much more square footage, others have numerous buildings. The properties are often much larger than the typical city or suburban lot. And the amenities are more plentiful and higher-end. Think special pools, gardens, and gathering spaces.
  3. The McMansion is much more attainable for people than the extra-large property. Does the McMansion offer enough of a taste of the high-end property?

Decline in luxury home sales – but few have to buy or sell

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Reading this overview of the decline of sales in the luxury housing market, a few quotes stood out to me about a particular aspect of this segment of housing:

Photo by Chris Goodwin on Pexels.com

As for purchasing real estate in all cash, Treasurys seem like a better bet than real estate right now, Ms. Fairweather said. “No investor wants to put their money into an asset that is going down in value,” she said.

Mr. Chan said he believes the slowdown in activity is more severe in the luxury market because high-end homeowners have a greater degree of discretion about when to sell and at what price. Often, sellers face no financial pressure to move, he said; they can just wait it out…

Many sellers, however, haven’t adjusted to the new realities of the market, Mr. Chan said. Some of his buyers have made lowball offers on homes, only to be met with significant resistance. “It’s a stalemate,” he said. “Sellers are living in the past, the buyers are living in the future.”…

One of her listings, a $14.95 million oceanfront mansion in Carlsbad, Calif., has been on the market since June. While the seller received one verbal offer, a sale never materialized. Still, she said, her client is wealthy and isn’t desperate to sell. “They don’t have to ever sell—they can carry these properties in perpetuity,” she said.

If housing has become more of an investment among all Americans, this segment of the market might exemplify this the most. Housing is a commodity that needs to be at the right price to buy or sell. Even as these homes signify status and a certain lifestyle, they are also a commodity with perceptions about what is a “good price.” When wealthy people have money – the economy is good, corporate profits are up, interest rates are relatively low – they want to purchase expensive and exclusive properties. When economic times are not as good – interest rates are higher, there is more uncertainty – luxury housing might be just that: a luxury.

If everyone is trying to get ahead with the best deal, how many people end up profiting compared to the other actors in this market? There are other motivations for moving beyond making money or getting a good return on investment; this helps guarantee there is some real estate activity in more troubled economic times.

Get a house that is zero-carbon over its lifetime…for $32 million in Malibu

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It will take a little money to acquire the first zero-carbon home in California:

Photo by Vinicius Maciel on Pexels.com

The roughly 14,400-square-foot modern ranch-style house has all electric appliances and mechanical systems, and comes with an organic vegetable garden, orchard and apiary, according to marketing materials. In addition, the develop said it reduced carbon emissions during construction by using alternative building materials.

“This home will have zero [carbon] emissions throughout its lifetime,” said Scott Morris of Crown Pointe Estates, developer of the home. The average U.S. home emits 8.3 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data…

Until recently, developers have focused on reducing energy use in homes, but attention is expanding to include cutting embodied carbon, the greenhouse gases that are emitted during the manufacturing, transportation and disposal of building materials, said Cliff Majersik, a senior adviser at the Institute for Market Transformation, a Washington, D.C., think tank with public and private funding that promotes investment in low-energy building. If the developers rigorously reduced and measured embodied carbon, and offset the remaining carbon, it would be a “very impressive achievement,” he said.

According to Mr. Morris, Crown Pointe reduced the embodied carbon in this home’s construction by replacing 80,000 pounds of steel in the original home design for sustainable timber. It says it slashed its concrete usage by 14% by replacing a concrete-slab foundation with a crawl-space foundation. And rather than place a concrete subfloor beneath the wood and stone floors, it used a rubber underlay made from recycled tires. Around 25% of the concrete used is recycled, the developer said.

This is a cool feat and yet it is not exactly anything close to an average home. The irony here is that this zero-carbon home both costs so much – it is a luxury in a premium location to be zero-carbon – and it is such a big house – a reduced environmental footprint yet still taking up a lot of land and having a quintessentially American square footage. Does this make being zero-carbon a status symbol?

How long until this kind of home is within reach of more homeowners? Some of this technology would be possible in much smaller homes but it could still be costly to eliminate carbon from all the other materials.

Out with vacation McMansions but keep going with pricey, exclusive, luxurious homes

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An article about a popular new development in Park City, Utah suggests millennials do not want McMansions but the rest of the text suggests they are not giving up on having nice homes:

https://www.benlochranch.com/

What Benloch Ranch represents is a collision of trends in real estate and demographics. Millennials of homebuying age are rejecting the sizes of their parents’ homes, so-called cookie-cutter McMansions. And the second-home market, hastened by COVID and the same millennial-buying population, is booming. The pandemic has forced buyers to value outdoor spaces and activities more than ever before. Benloch Ranch currently has a waitlist of 175 for its single-family lots…

The development’s amenities include more than 20 miles of trails, a ski hill, a skeet shooting range, an ice skating pond and 900 acres of open space…

A lot of millenials don’t want these big houses anymore. We’re redefining the size and scale of the house and altering the price point so it’s more affordable.”

According to data released by the Park City Board of REALTORS, the median price  single-family home rose roughly 26% year-over-year to $2.5 million. Benloch Ranch offers single-family homes starting at $695,000.

The pitch is an attractive one: lean into the terrain and the idea of sustainability, feature interesting architecture, provide amenities, be close to an exciting scene and in at the start of a new development. This is a shift to new preferences of millennial buyers. The vacation homes of today and the future may look different and there is money to be made.

At the same time, this is about vacation homes in a wealthy community. This development has potential because millennials with resources can afford a vacation home starting at $700k. Sure, there are no more McMansions with all of that wasted space and tacky design but this kind of life is only available to those who can buy into it. The price for these homes would be beyond the reach of many residents of the Salt Lake City region, let alone many residents of the United States.

Does this mean the McMansion vacation homes of an older generation will not find buyers? This will be worth watching, both for vacation homes and regular homes. If McMansions go out of style, this could be reflected in lower prices or modifications – imagine multiple units – or even redevelopment.

Looking at creepy abandoned McMansions on TikTok

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Empty McMansions that were intended to be part of a resort in Missouri have caught the attention of TikTok users:

As @carriejernigan1 explains in her video, the Indian Ridge Resort was meant to be a $1.6 billion development, complete with a wild amount of luxurious amenities. According to Missouri’s KYTV-TV, developers wanted Indian Ridge Resort to feature a shopping mall, a marina, a golf course, a 390-room hotel, a museum and the world’s second-largest indoor water park.

Many of those projects never got off the ground, as @carriejernigan1’s video shows. TikTok users were naturally creeped out by her clip, which shows decaying McMansions amid a sea of overgrown plants. Some called the ghost town “scary” or “nightmare-inducing.”…

This is not the first time I have run across creepy McMansions in Missouri. I recall the presence of McMansions in Gone Girl. Perhaps McMansions make some sense here: it is a conservative state in the middle of the country where people might be more willing to purchase such homes.

At the same time, the connection to a resort near Branson is an interesting twist. This is not just a normal suburban neighborhood of McMansions occupied by crass suburbanites in the Midwest. These homes were part of a larger luxurious project. From the TikTok video, the homes themselves seem to be larger than a typical suburban McMansion. The McMansions themselves are not meant to on their own impress people visiting or driving by; the whole resort community would help do that.

This also offers intriguing possibilities for how these McMansions might be reused. It may not be worth it for another developer to come in and finish off these homes. Could the materials be repurposed? Could the homes be completed but subdivided to create smaller units? Could this be some sort of weird theme park involving these homes (think Halloween where abandoned McMansions become haunted houses)?

The “world’s most expensive home” – $340 million! – about to go on sale

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Architectural Digest displays and summarizes the features of what is a very expensive property in Los Angeles:

After nearly a decade of design and development work, what is being billed as “the world’s most expensive home” is finally ready for its close-up. Set on a five-acre parcel in the posh Los Angeles enclave of Bel Air—and aptly named The One—the 105,000-square-foot property’s interiors have remained a closely guarded secret. Until now. AD has been an exclusive look at what’s inside this record-setting property—and the design and aesthetic minds that made it happen.

Surrounded on three sides by a moat and a 400-foot-long jogging track, the estate appears to float above the city. Completed over eight years—and requiring 600 works to build—the home was designed by architect Paul McClean, who was enlisted by owner and developer Nile Niami to help it live up to its reported $340 million price tag…

Beyond the eye-catching design are the home’s equally jaw-dropping stats. There are 42 bathrooms, 21 bedrooms, a 5,500-square-foot master suite, a 30-car garage gallery with two car-display turntables, a four-lane bowling alley, a spa level, a 30-seat movie theater, a “philanthropy wing (with a capacity of 200) for charity galas with floating pods overlooking Los Angeles, a 10,000-square-foot sky deck, and five swimming pools…

Due to recently approved city ordinances, a house of this magnitude will never again be built in Los Angeles, which means The One will truly remain one of a kind. “This project has been such a long and educational journey for us all,” McClean notes. “It was approached with excitement and was thrilling to create, but I don’t think any of us realized just how much effort and time it would take to complete the project.”

What a house – and at a particular time. With concerns about mansionization in Los Angeles plus COVID-19 and its effects exacerbating inequality in capital and housing and shedding light on how much space people have, here is an incredibly large and expensive home. Given the limited pool of actors with the resources to purchase this home, these larger patterns might not matter much.

Down the road, because of its size and price alone does this become a local or international landmark? Or, because it is a single-family home in an exclusive location, will this house rarely be seen? Some of this might depend on who the owner is. The next step in the news coverage is to figure out who purchases the home and what they do with it and then the legacy of the property will come later.

It would be interesting to compare this home to previous properties that claimed to be the most expensive or the largest. I recall an effort in Florida to construct a 75,000 foot home; a documentary about the home detailed some of the process and issues that arose.

“NYC isn’t dead”…for the wealthiest

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A look at the ten most expensive properties sold in the United States in 2020 highlights the presence of New York City properties on the list:

Google Street View image of 220 Central Park South (September 2020)

By the end of September, the volume of Manhattan co-op and condo sales was down 43% year over year, according to a report by Douglas Elliman, as sellers held back from listing their apartments and buyers increasingly gravitated toward the suburbs…

Of the top 10 national sales compiled by Jonathan Miller, president and chief executive officer of Miller Samuel appraisers, five were in 220 Central Park South, a new luxury tower on Central Park designed by architects at Robert A.M. Stern…

Another trend from this year, namely rich people “fleeing” New York for Florida, didn’t manage to trickle up to the highest tier. Only two of this year’s top 10 sales were in Palm Beach; last year there were three…

Even the three Los Angeles entries diverge slightly from conventional 2020 narratives. Yes, the L.A. market is one of the few urban bright lights this year, with sales soaring and inventory hard to come by. But numbers at the very top are down from last year, when it notched four entries in the top 10, totaling $463 million. This year there were three, totaling $293 million.

The actions of the wealthiest homeowners matters not only because people often have an interest in what those who have lots of money do with all that money; it matters because these are people with clout and influence. If they are continuing to purchase in New York City – it is less clear how much time the owners would necessarily spend in the city – it is a sign of the importance of the city and the prospects for future development.

The optics of 2020 might not be favorable to the list above but the project and the trends were underway far ahead of COVID-19. In a very expensive land and housing market, purchasing a residence in one of the newest buildings and in such a location within Manhattan is an object of desire for some who have the resources to purchase such places. While a figure later in the article notes that the total price for the properties on this list is lower than the price for the properties the year before, this may only allow the wealthiest to get into hot markets even more.

It may (or may not) be worth noting that five of the ten properties are in a tower in New York City while the other five properties are large homes on some land. On the whole, Americans as a whole tend to prefer or idealize single-family homes but the wealthiest in the United States and elsewhere may be more inclined to purchase large units in multi-unit buildings.

Live the American Dream in a $180k, 375 square foot tiny home

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Tiny houses could provide needed cheap housing and upgraded models might also appeal to people. Here is an example of a higher-end model:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/180-000-tiny-home-outfitted-173504352.html

David Latimer of New Frontier Design is creating tiny homes that are more luxurious and more expensive than most you’d find on the market today. His most recent model, the Escher, starts at $180,000 and is designed to fit a family of six full time. Latimer calls this “the future family home.”…

The Escher is unlike most tiny homes, nearing $200,000 and including high-end features. But Latimer said that doesn’t make this model any less of a tiny house.

“Minimalism means different things for different people,” Latimer said. “The bottom line is that downsizing is a tremendous life adjustment and sacrifice for anybody. This tiny house is still a minimalistic lifestyle. It’s still a tiny home.”…

“I believe micro-housing is going to be a substantial part of the future of residential housing,” Latimer said. “Millenials and Gen Z are going to live this way. I would bet my life on this. Micro housing will allow people to live out the American dream.”

I am not surprised there is a perceived market for more expensive tiny houses. At a basic level, perhaps this is just selling the same products to different parts of the market: some people want to pay less for a tiny house, others will pay more. Indeed, from what I can gather about who moves into or at least talks publicly about moving into tiny houses, it looks like there are some educated people with some resources who want tiny houses with upgrades.

More broadly, I am not sure how a more expensive house fits into “the tiny house movement.” Downsizing and having a cheaper home are often connected to anti-consumerist motives and behavior. Some people make the choice to acquire a tiny house in order to move away from having too many items or fixating on a large home or being so financially committed. Does a luxury tiny house try to have it both ways?

If this kind of tiny house – small but still nearly $200,000 – is going to become part of the American Dream, the definition of the American Dream may need to change. For decades now, the American Dream involves owning a single-family home, probably in the suburbs. The Escher could indeed technically fulfill this – provide a single-family home in the suburbs – but it is very different in substance. If anything motivates people to make this the embodiment of the American Dream, it may be financial realities rather than aspirations for a simpler, downsized American Dream. In other words, expensive housing markets and debt may push people toward more luxurious tiny homes rather than a true desire to ditch the big showy house for a high-status small house.

Anticipating reading a heavy, expensive, detailed book

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Having recently heard of Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create Their Classic Albums, I am now looking forward to reading the book.

Several thoughts on the book that at this point I have only flipped through quickly:

  1. Even working in academia where I am used to tracking down books and sources, this is an unusual book in several ways. It is heavy. It is an odd size. And it is expensive: copies on Amazon go for $600+.
  2. While the book is unusual, it has an impressive level of detail. Much has been written about the Beatles and I have read a number of these books. But, how many people are interested in the recording techniques and extensive information on equipment and actions in the studio? This appears to be a great source for those interested.
  3. This is the sort of text that is difficult to reproduce digitally. Sure, it could all be hyperlinked and the graphics could be made interactive or could be videos. But, to have a comprehensive source like this to hold and flip over provides a particular kind of experience.
  4. At the same time, popular and scholarly writing on The Beatles regularly cites their studio techniques as part of their magic. Not only did they write great songs and play together well; they harnessed and challenged the existing technology available at the time to do big things. While the technology and options may seem quaint now, it was a factor in their success.
  5. One of the enduring questions about The Beatles and other successful artists is what exactly came together in their work. Technology played a role but I assume this book will also offer insights into the human interactions and efforts. As many have noted, The Beatles were more than just four group members: there was a team around them that both helped and challenged them. Technology may have enabled or constrained but the group dynamics matter.

Toll Brothers, smaller homes, and “affordable luxury”

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Can a smaller home also be luxurious? Toll Brothers is looking to sell such an option:

In an effort to expand into new segments of the housing market that fit into its wheelhouse, Toll is putting a new focus on reaching out to the first-time homebuyer, particularly through its concept of “affordable luxury.”…

Historically, luxury in the housing market has meant McMansions. However, Toll Brothers has broadened its offerings to include luxury apartment buildings, and its newest effort: affordable luxury. The affordable luxury niche (Toll won’t refer to it as a “segment”) is geared toward the millennial buyer, who is buying later in life and often has more financial resources than the typical first-time homebuyer. Currently, 37% of Toll’s offerings now have price points below $500,000, and in some areas hit $375,000. Note, however, that these are base prices, and when customization and additional amenities push the prices higher. Still, affordable luxury properties fall well below Toll’s average selling price in the fourth quarter of $857,800. The increased density (meaning smaller units/properties built close to each other) of these projects will help Toll maintain margins despite the lower price points.

During the earnings conference call on Dec. 9, Toll Brothers CEO Douglas Yearly explained the concept:

“While affordable luxury crosses all buyer segments including move-up and active-adult, this initiative is driven in large part by a growing number of millennials who are older, more affluent, and more discerning when they buy their first home. Think of it as a BMW 3 Series, a great example of affordable luxury.”

While there is a lot of concern in recent years about developers constructing few new starter homes and millennials not being able to buy into the housing market, could this plan suggest another factor at work: are younger adults expecting more out of their first home? Having a dwelling is one thing; people need a place to live and store their stuff. But, when committing to homeownership for the first time, do buyers expect the features they see all over TV and in the homes they knew growing up: open kitchens and living spaces, nice appliances, custom finishes, designer touches, plenty of bathrooms and bedrooms?

Toll Brothers says they are aiming at people who want their first home to not be just a dwelling: they want “affordable luxury.” One could argue that if people really needed first-time homes, perhaps the tiny home industry should be booming (and it is not mainstream yet). This builder believes there is a market for buyers who do not just want a home; they want a distinguished home that feels good to live in and shows well to others.

I have noted before that having smaller homes in the United States does not necessarily mean they will forgo nicer touches or be cheaper. I would guess there are a good number of buyers who are willing to trade some square footage (there is some bottom limit – many people do not want to truly live in a really small house) for luxury items in the home.