Good news for hardwood floor owners – home buyers are deciding to stay in their homes longer. Home buyers prefer hardwood floors to carpet & other sources of flooring for a variety of reasons, one of them being because of increased value! And the best part is that today’s hardwood floors are built to last several years and are covered by extended warranties.
The Home Buyer Report Findings
Following the Great Recession – towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century – the state’s housing market has been struggling to recover from the market meltdown, slowly but progressively.
The 2015 Survey of California Home Buyers report released by the California Association of Realtors revealed that people who lost their home between 2008 and 2009 are looking to buy again.
Additionally, home buyers, including younger wage earners forming households and other buyers have expressed that they intend to live in their homes for an average of 20 years.
This is a big change compared to earlier years here buyers preferred to scale in terms of their home purchases. A survey conducted in 2013 showed that home buyers stayed in their homes for an average of six years before moving-up. This indicates a three-fold increase in the number of years preferred for home retention.
Comparison to the Rest of the Country
These findings suggest a drastic change in the average length of home ownership in California, which has always been in the single-digit years. This is much lower compared to the national average, which according to the American Housing Survey (AHS), has averaged 13 years between 1987 and 2011, with trade-up buyers consistently staying longer than first-time buyers. A 2013 report by the AHS suggested that single-family home buyers stayed for 11.5 years while buyers who have owned a home before stayed for 15 years.
The Trend in California
It is possible that the drastic preference to own a home for longer is due to rising home prices, which has resulted in affordability problems across a considerable market segment. Affordability has always been a concern for first-time buyers, but it is rarely considered when it comes to trade-up buyers.
The new trend is attributed to household formation, with 12 percent of the buyers having previously lived with their parents before buying the home; the desire to buy a home instead of paying rent for 15 percent; reasonable home pricing, with 85 percent of buyers claiming that their home is worth what they paid for it; and lower down-payment on the total value of the home (24 percent) compared to 28 percent in 2014.