McMansions - A Thing of The Past
McMansion is a pejorative term for a large new house which is judged as pretentious, tasteless, or badly designed for its neighborhood.
For the last 4 or 5 years the term McMansion has been in the news and on all of our minds. We have seen them and done deals on many of them and now it seems they maybe a thing of the past. I know when I drive through specific areas in Denver, Colorado such as Cherry Creek, Washington Park, Observatory Park and Cory-Merrill I see them everywhere. For the most part in our town, these areas are central to downtown and are the older parts of Denver. Which means to developers they were a true gem. They have large lots, the homes can easily be scraped and it is a desirable location to the urban areas most families now want to be. For about the last 8-10 years the McMansions have been popping up all over Denver and let me tell you some of these things are giants! Were talking at 4000 square feet, 5 + bedrooms, media rooms and much more. The consumer was wanting this product and so the builders produced it.
Now....they are seeing there day and we should take a moment and remember them.
After years of growth, the Census Bureau recently reported that median new home size fell to 2,135 square feet in 2009 after peaking at more than 2,300 earlier in the decade.Kermit Baker, chief economist for the American Institute of Architects, pointed out that consumers don't ask for as much for spaces devoted to single purposes, such as media rooms for watching videos and game rooms for shooting pool. Instead, the requests are for rooms with shared uses."We continue to move away from the 'McMansion' chapter of residential design," he said. Now, the typical U.S. owner-occupied home has six rooms, with three of them being bedrooms, according to the Census Bureau's annual American Housing Survey. The most common number of baths is two or more.
McMansions just look and feel out of place today, given the more cautious environment everyone living in, the new home buyer is now looking for something around 2000-3000 square feet. Many in the real estate business today are calling down sizing "right sizing". Meaning that people just aren't interested in these large expensive homes anymore after seeing themselves struggle and family members around them fall into foreclosure.
In Denver, the economy has defiantly given our home buyers a new prospective on how big of a house they really need. Not to say that there aren't some people out there still looking to get into a 4000+ but we are finding that the people around here are finding creative ways to make a 2500 square foot home work for a family of 5.
Really, we all grew up in that size of a house or maybe even smaller so there really isn't a reason to think it cannot be done. Today's homes can be designed to be so functional on the inside with creative spaces and plenty of storage that there really just isn't a need or point to having these massive homes anymore.
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