“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” — Albert Einstein
Have you recently been into a home on the resale market and been able to tell by the exterior styling and the interior finishes exactly what decade it was built in? If remodeling is part of your scope of business, you’ve seen it firsthand—removing yesterday’s glitzy and ornate for the simple, uncluttered, minimalistic look. But wait! Have you heard that black is the new gray? Did you know that people are getting tired of safe and neutral and looking for a little more color in 2020?
As a member of the home building industry, staying current, relevant and savvy is always a moving target. Culling through the trends to decide what will be sustainable long term is equally important. As the Einstein quote says, you’ve got to find balance, but you must keep moving. It’s not an easy business we’re in!
This month’s Sales Savvy article by Paul Evans makes an important point about predicting carrying costs and pricing that into your asking price. But we’ve all seen the ill effects of what can happen when a builder miscalculates and keeps a house in his or her inventory far longer than anticipated—possibly due to being too late in updating the style, and occasionally being too early or off the mark in what the local marketplace is ready to embrace. As you read our annual Curb Appeal focus section, it is important to consider the style trends and weigh their long-term appeal and our market’s own unique style preferences as you work with your designer or architect to keep your home styles and material choices fresh and exciting.
In your quest for relevance, you might glean some lessons from Toyota, too. One of the reasons we run our Savvy Trucks & Toys column in Building Savvy is that history proves again and again that the construction and automotive industries face similar challenges and opportunities. Take, for example, the replacement of traditional vehicles with intelligent cars and compare that to an issue our industry faces–the potential shift of Americans away from homeownership to renting—the subject of this month’s Savvy Special Report. As Winston Churchill said, “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Stay tuned!
Appeared on Dallas/Fort Worth Building Savvy – March 2020 – https://www.thesavvylist.com/building-savvy/building-savvy-magazine/dallas-fort-worth-building-savvy-march-2020/
