Top 10 home features, and more
Builders are acting on a trend toward smaller homes, with 38% indicating they built smaller homes in 2023 to help support home sales and 26% indicating they plan to build even smaller in 2024.
Those are statistics from the 2024 edition of “What Home Buyers Really Want,’ a survey from the National Association of Home Builders.
Builders are also working to bridge the gap on housing affordability by cutting home prices, providing sales incentives and offering more affordable finishes. Median new homes prices dropped to $427,400 in 2023 — down 7 percentage points from 2022, a drop not seen since 2009 — while existing home prices continued to rise to $394,600, marking a 1 percentage point increase over the prior year.
In addition to identifying the smaller-house trend, the survey dug into the most likely features in the typical new home of 2024.
Here are the top ten, and the percentage of builders who indicated that they were likely to include them:
During a press conference held at Design + Construction Week in Las Vegas, the NAHB also revealed the ten fastest growing features of the last decade.
The chart below reveals the percentage of home buyers who considered the various features essential or desirable in 2012 and how that percentage grew in 2023.
Scroll over the bars to reveal the percentage points gained by each feature in the last decade.
