Explaining Real Estate to Kids -- And Their Parents in Ann Arbor

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It's going to be one of those days.

I've agreed to speak to a couple of classes of fifth and sixth graders for career day in the morning and to appear on local television for a segment on home renovation projects that pay.
Fortunately, I have no children attending the elementary school (my youngest is turning 18 next month) so I won't be compromising their social status by appearing. To kids, real estate sounds pretty boring, so I always emphasize the home-improvement part of the job and all the TV do-it-yourself hosts I've met. I bring along the technology I now use for multimedia presentations, the digital still and video cameras and the digital tape recorder, as well as the old standby reporter's notebook and pen.

In the years that I've been covering real estate, both the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Homebuilders have conducted campaigns to get children interested in real estate. The booklets, which often provide children the opportunity to color, suggest that children have a big say in where they live and even the kinds of houses their parents buy.
Looking back on my own childhood, that kind of thinking is a bit of a stretch. My parents never bothered to ask us before they moved. The only benefit I'd ever gotten out of a move was my own room. If I had even suggested that I should have a say in housing decisions, my parents probably would have made me pay part of the mortgage.

Children today are different than in my day, and, thanks to television and the Internet, they have different ideas about what they want in a house, whether or not they are part of the decision. Even in the city, their ideas show very much a suburban influence.

A few years ago, an architect was asked to design houses for a development in Camden, NJ, a city of mostly brick 19th and early 20th century rowhouses where the last new housing was built in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The architect held a focus group for the children of the low and moderate income potential buyers of these houses.

Every child drew a detached house with a slanting roof that looked more like what you'd find 10 miles outside the city in the communities that had sprung up in the 1960s and 1970s. What each of them spent the most time drawing was the door, which protected them from the dangers of the world outside.

As a growing number of suburban developers have returned to building in the cities, a difference in opinion about what they should be building has arisen. The home-grown developers have been sticking to the urban design model, updating the traditional city interior to accommodate high-tech wiring and a more open floor plan without sacrificing the scale.

Developers from the suburban experience have been building townhouses with McMansion interiors. Each has its fan among buyers, with people moving within the city sticking with urban design and empty nesters from the suburbs going for what they're used to as well.
That brings me to the second part of my day, which is the television segment on what renovations bring great rewards. My argument always has been that trends are not generated from the bottom up, but from the top down, so what the manufacturers say you should add to your house this year could be outdated by next year.

In addition, while middle and lower income buyers might think that the oven that sings and dances while cooking your Thanksgiving turkey is amusing and even cool, they aren't going to pay the seller extra for it. Not today in this market, and perhaps not even in the late, lamented boom market.

They also aren't going to pay extra for things they assume that should be standard in every house: Fresh paint, a dry basement, a roof that doesn't leak, a workable kitchen, bathrooms with shower and bathtub.

I get questions all the time from sellers asking how much painting your house will add to the sale price. My answer is that not painting would not only reduce the sale price but, faced with the thought and expense of having to paint after they buy, most buyers will move on to the next house -- of which, of course, there are more than enough.
There's also a question of taste. Never believe that your taste is the same as the next person's. Most importantly, what adds value to your house is what you want, not how much you think adding it will increase the price at sale.

Trying to anticipate what buyers want is a lot like winning at gambling: 99.9 percent luck, and the rest skill.

Related Articles:
Articles by Al Heavens

Written by Al Heavens

Al Heavens writes about real estate and home repair and improvement. He is the author of What No One Ever Tells You About Renovating Your Home: Real-Life Advice For Hassle-free, Cost-Effective Remodeling (Dearborn Press).

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