Less money, less house: How market forces are reshaping the American home

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Major homebuilders are prioritizing narrower houses with fewer doors, windows and cabinets. Median homes sizes are at a 13-year low.

After years of prioritizing large homes, the nation’s biggest and most powerful home builders are finally building morein the past year, to 2,179 square feet, census data shows, the lowest reading since 2010.

The stand-alone houses she toured were well beyond her $450,000 budget. Cheshire looked for six weeks, was outbid twice and eventually landed a newly constructed townhouse for $408,000. It checks all the boxes, albeit at a smaller scale — the garage, for example, fits one car, not two. But more importantly, she said, it’s affordable.

“We are continuing to shift … to more and more of our smaller floor plans to address affordability issues in the market,” Jessica Hansen, senior vice president of communications, said in a November earnings call. The country added fewer single-family homes in the 2010s than in any decade since the 1960s, according to Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist, resulting in a shortage of millions of homes.

“We compromised on so many things: location, square footage, kitchen,” she said. “But we’re very lucky that we were able to buy at all.”

 

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