Are Open Plan Homes slowing Traditional Home sales in Naples ?

Posted by Joseph Epifanio on Thursday, June 1st, 2017 at 9:13am.

Times change and so do styles and ideas, for years designers and architects have styled their homes on a somewhat similar concept. Houses are traditionally built with a living room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms and maybe an office. All over the world, homes have similar features and include most of these basic rooms.

But things have changed and the way they have moved on in Naples is affecting the sales of existing homes. The way we live our lives has changed and therefore our homes have been altered to accommodate our needs. We all used to lock ourselves in our own little space, be it a bedroom, office or kitchen, privacy was important, using a landline for instance with everyone listening made walls important. Privacy is still important, but the way the world has advanced with technology has had a huge affect one the way we live in our homes.

Now being private may mean having earplugs in while watching movie or listening to music, making it possible for people to sit side by side doing totally different things without disturbing each other. We used to talk to our friends by phone, but now text and instant messages are taking over. In the past we would cloister ourselves away close the doors and have private conversations, walls were important, but now they are not.

We have changed as a society, no longer is cooking done alone in a kitchen, children do not sit in their bedrooms doing homework, technology now allows us to carry out different tasks whilst all being in the same room but without disturbing each other, these changes have affected the way we want our homes. Living in an open plan house allows families to be together, but at the same time, technology allows us to do our own thing.

Open plan homes are now really in demand, as a Realtor in Naples, I spend time talking endlessly to clients about the style of homes they want to live in and also about the homes they are selling. The two appear to be vastly different with many people wanting to leave the traditional closed in home and move into a modern open plan home.

This is having an affect on home sales in Naples, with so many new communities being built in Naples, selling an older Naples home with a traditional floor plan can be challenging, the way we live now means homes with separate dining rooms for instance are considered old fashioned.

My advice to owners of older homes is this, if you want to compete with the new home sales, then it’s important to either price it right so it sells to someone wanting to do some updating, you should not expect to get the same price as a home in your area that has already been updated. Or, do some updating and if you can, open up the walls, paint all the walls a light bright clean color, create the feeling of space that is the hallmark of an open plan home.

The one thing that many older homes have in their advantage is the size of the lot, open plan new homes in new gated communities often come with zero lot lines, so whilst buyers are getting the style of home they want, they are sometimes compromising on the amount of land surrounding them. So if your older home can provide both the space and the open feel you have an advantage when selling.

Time stands still for no man, so progress and technology will continue to affect the way we live our lives and the way we build our homes. From everything my team and I see in the Naples real estate market, it looks like open plan homes are here to stay, at least until Ai takes over, but that’s a long way off, right?

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