BuilderOnline.com just posted an article entitled: 10 Lifestyle Trends to Watch For in 2012

These trends are likely to influence how consumers live for much longer than the next 12 months!

Take a look at these 10 Lifestyle Trends:

  1. Community Gardens: A darling of both organic advocates and the local-food movement, community gardening is a trend that’s bound to grow.
  2. Car and Bike Sharing: Due to the ongoing economic turmoil, thrift is decidedly in vogue; which makes this a perfect time for new-home communities to start incorporating car and bike shares into their master plans.
  3. Multigenerational Housing: According to Pew, adults between the ages of 25 and 34 accounted for the sharpest growth among those living in multigenerational households between 2007 and 2009, with a 16.8% jump—or about 1.3 million people.  And then there are the aging boomers—with 350,000 of them turning 65 each month, and approximately none of them wanting to admit they’ll ever need formal assisted living.
  4. Single Mothers: Between single mothers and single women, the two groups combined make up almost 40% of renting households, according to The Wall Street Journal. For savvy builders willing to cater to the single-woman demographic, this is a niche market just waiting to be tapped.
  5. Single-Level Living: Seven of the 10 best-selling plans at Builder House Plans this year were designed on a single level.
  6. Working from Home: The country’s current economic funk brought on round after round of layoffs, encouraging many people to try their hand at working for themselves. It’s little wonder, then, that architect Carson Looney, of Looney Ricks Kiss Architects, compared designing a house without a home office to designing a “car without brakes.”
  7. Virtual World: Increasingly, technology is changing not only the way Americans live in their homes, but also how they shop for a home and what they expect from the home-buying process. As a result, savvy builders are making their homes stand out in both the physical and virtual world, with services such as mousethruthehouse.com, which allows buyers to search and tour homes from the comfort of their couch.
  8. Rise of DIY: Judging by the explosive popularity of sites like Etsy and Pinterest, the do-it-yourself trend is a force to be reckoned with. Crafters across the country are making everything from their own furniture to their own soap, and often on a not-so-small scale. Add to that the thousands of boomers turning 65 every day, many of whom will soon find themselves with more free time than they’ve ever had, and you’ve got a huge market niche in need of spaces that accommodate hobbies and projects of every kind.
  9. Living Smaller: Projections from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies indicate that persons living alone will make up the largest share of household growth for the foreseeable future, as boomers lose spouses to either death or divorce and as the rising generation finally moves out on their own. The trend also dovetails nicely with the green movement, given that smaller homes use less material to build and take less energy to condition.
  10. Flight to Cultural Centers: Gen Y. This group is destined to shape the country’s consumer landscape every bit as much as their parents did, and they’re quickly coming into their first-time home buying years. So what is it they’re looking for? A solid 77% of them want to live in an urban core. They want to be close to their jobs, friends, and shopping venues, and according to a report by the Urban Land Institute, they want to be able to walk to get there.

Read the entire article here

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