Microtrends - Insight for Real Estate and Life - Part 3 (and Final)

In the last two posts, I explained Mark Penn's central theme and gave you some of the microtrends that impact real estate. Read them at Microtrends - Insight for Real Estate and Life - Part 1 and Microtrends - Insight for Real Estate and Life - Part 2. This final post about the book Microtrends covers some more of the trends Penn spotted that affect real estate everywhere, and in Flagstaff in particular. Mark Penn failed to relate the last one that I mention to real estate, but to me it hit home. (Pun intended).

A few years ago, I noticed the trend in my real estate business which Penn labels "Stay-at-Home Workers." Their only question they had for me was "does the house have high-speed internet?"  Of course, now every Flagstaff home has high-speed internet. Unless the satellite dish is covered with snow.

The word "microtrend" is a bit of an understatement for Second-Home Buyers when it comes to the Flagstaff real estate market, where 25% of our housing stock is estimated to be second homes - either vacation homes or places where parents house their kids while the kids attend Northern Arizona University. Plus a few other investment properties - probably no more than normal in any other college town.

We see fewer International Home Buyers in Flagstaff, unlike Manhattan, which according to Penn is a hotbed of international home buying. But in the last few years we have seen people from the U.S. State Department and the United Nations buy or sell their Flagstaff homes with Team Heitland at RE/MAX Peak Properties.

Flagstaff is a popular place for Penn's microtrend of Working Retireds. Some seniors work because they have to, but the microtrend is those who work because they love to work. Penn reports a Merrill Lynch survey taken in 2005 in which 75% of baby-boomers reported that they have no intention to seek a traditional retirement. Many of these boomers are switching careers rather than retiring, and they look for a second career in a place where they can also enjoy life. Of course, many also just stay on the job. Penn notes that trend may force younger workers, who find no room to move-up in traditional jobs (since the boomers aren't moving on), to move out into entrepreneurships. Either way, it involves moving and home buying and selling.

Penn has a chapter on Hard of Hearers. He notes that there are an increasing number of us as the population ages and as young people still blow out their hearing with loud music, generation after generation. Penn mentions nothing about how this affects housing, but I've got some ideas based on my own experience.

I attribute my hearing loss to heredity rather than the Rolling Stones (but I could be fooling myself). Homes need intercoms for people like us. We can't shout from one end of the house to the other and expect to understand each other like we used to. Furthermore, those intercoms have to improve in quality. Having designed and decorated our home with lots of hard surfaces to alleviate allergies, we find that, in our old age, we need to add soft surfaces to absorb sound. I predict new home décor trends based on this "Hard of Hearers" microtrend.

All in all, I recommend this book. Penn covers 75 microtrends and I've just covered a few in these three posts that relate to real estate. You're sure to find others that you can relate other parts of your life to. 

To see how I've written about Microtrends for my clients, click here.

For the 1st Active Rain post about my take on Microtrends click here.

For the 2d Active Rain post about my take on Microtrends click here.

For everything about Flagstaff Real Estate, click here!