Paraphrased, one of our noted elected government officials has said that if the new President governs in such a way as to keep America safe and create a lot of jobs in the next four years, “everything else is noise.”
The comment bares a stark reality for those who develop, design, build, and market new homes and neighborhoods. A month of the new year is already coming to a close, and it’s already time to gut-check tactics underlying your strategies, resource allocations underlying your budget, and day-to-day management underlying your leadership. If 2017 is to continue a run of successively improving years in the life of the post-Great Recession housing recovery, people in the business of home building need to focus on “the signal” in their livelihoods and careers, and do their best to ignore “the noise” of distraction.
It’s “go time” now. Companies are “going concerns” because they’re able to go, and they do that. Home building development, architectural design, landscape design, and construction firms do business when they sell up a storm and deliver on the promise that their vertical structures “live” as value incarnate.
We’re believers that beyond the noise, afield of preoccupations with what Washington thinks and Washington does, America and Americans will respond well to home builders and developers and planners and designers who do their best work–positioning, creating product, pricing, place-making, and marketing value in a new house or a new community.
Consumer trends and behaviors make markets, not noise. One of the consumer trends we believe will play the most important role in shaping the trajectory of housing’s continued recovery in 2017 is the aging–in new and different ways–of society’s primary wealth-holders, the 55+.
An overlooked factor in what makes a consumer trend however is the role a marketer, a manufacturer, a service provider, or a builder plays, the role of catalyst. Many people look at consumer trends as a trail to follow. Some look at them as a trail to blaze.
One of the fresher insights that has come out of the study and practice of generational marketing–mapping products, design, pricing, messaging, positioning etc. to key psychographic characteristic values, attitudes, preferences, behaviors–is that sheer heft may make an age cohort look homogeneous, but beneath that thin veneer of sameness lies a complex of subgroups whose motivations and proclivities may differ profoundly from one another.
In “Big Shifts Ahead, Demographic Clarity for Businesses,” housing guru John Burns and his partner Chris Porter offer definitive intelligence into housing business challenges and opportunities that come of applying people and household patterns to the investment of money, land, talent, materials, and designs, and labor in residential real estate and construction.
Core to the Burns and Porter message is that commonly-held models that tie generational cohorts to business opportunities and risks are broken. They provide a new, evidence-based template to recognize patterns that should be especially helpful for those who have to make investment decisions and put capital in place long before returns start materializing, i.e. those who make homes and neighborhoods.
One thing we learned this past year in working with Taylor Morrison on our NEXTadventure Home project in Orlando is that cracking the 55+ code in 2017 is a work-in-progress. What everybody knows is that prior business models and strategies to serve retirees may have worked very well and built real estate empires, but the center will not hold.
Today’s 55+er is different. Tomorrow’s, literally, will be different still.
One of the light-bulbs that flashed brightly in our work on NEXTadventure with the Taylor Morrison team, architects Housing Design Matters, Lita Dirks & Co., and Waldrop Engineering, is this notion that the consumer behavior trend underlying people’s motivation to buy into a 55+ community has to do with a fundamental feeling of “starting out” vs. “ending up.”
Here’s analysis that sheds more light on that phenomenon among 55+ers. It’s from Euromonitor International’s consumer trends consultant Daphne Kasriel-Alexander, and it asserts that there’s a “changing narrative” to aging that explains why “active adult community” models may be bygone, and why NEXTadventure may be the start of a new business, neighborhood-making, and design model for 55+ consumers today. Aging and anti-aging seem to have coalesced in such a way as to redefine what over 50 means. Here’s one example:
“Midorexia” is a label for middle-aged and older consumers who suddenly dare to act younger than their years, embarking on rigorous triathlons (called “young sports” in Latin America) or keen to borrow their offspring’s clothing. Shane Watson, writing in the UK’s Daily Mail in 2016 observes, “Those in the grip of Midorexia think…they look amazing—in the dungarees or the plaits or the thigh boots”. Mr. Watson believes the “blame” rests on a host of improved consumer props, including better hair dye, fitness trackers and diets they can rely on as confidence-boosters.
If that’s not all about NEXTadventure, what is? Thing is, if you read John Burns and Chris Porter’s book, you’ll realize that even if there is a right answer that’s going to drive your business in 2017 and 2018, you’re going to have to keep reinventing the wheel in some ways to continue to stay on target with this group.
It’s about blazing the trail, rather than simply following it. It’s about paying attention to the signal, and being aware of but unswayed by the noise.
