U.S.A: Virtual home tour – Values apparent from the homes of American consumers
The United States possesses the world’s largest GRP, with the world’s third largest population after India and China. A sizable proportion of its population are young people and in the prime of their working lives, making it an appealing market.
This article will examine American consumers’ values and the factors behind this from a home and lifestyle slant using the “Consumer Life Panorama” database INTAGE offers.
*This article is a reformatted version of a seminar conducted on June 20, 2023.
American consumers are of the outlook the homes they live in should change in line with their life stage. They thus frequently move – 11.7 times on average in their lifetimes according to their bureau of statistics*.
They generally move 6 – 7 times after graduating university, typically upon joining the workforce, getting married, in line with their children getting bigger, and leaving the nest. They move homes based not only on their income, but life stage-based priorities including length of commute, areas for children to play, and tax measures. Let’s take a look at a typical example of moving. A new university graduate moves into a studio apartment in the city, then to a two- or three-bedroom apartment close to the city upon getting married, and to a house with a garden in the suburbs once their children grow up.
While rental properties might seem an easier option with these frequent moves, American consumers clearly have a stronger desire to own their own home to live in as well as investment properties. They also consider their homes an investment, so many want to purchase one while they are young if possible. Diagram 1 depicts the results of a survey conducted in respective countries on outlooks on life stage and investment. American consumers clearly have a stronger desire to own a home at life stages such as “graduating university”, “getting married”, and “having children”. They are also characterized by their stronger desire to own investment properties than in other countries.
Let’s now take a look at how American consumers actually change homes in line with their life stage through using the virtual home visit function in INTAGE’s “Consumer Life Panorama” to see actual newlyweds’ homes and the homes of families with grown up children.
Newlyweds’ home
This is the home of a 29-year-old woman who lives opposite Manhattan with her husband and 1-year old son. They have a household income of $250,000, and while not wealthy, are in a demographic known as power couples. They live in a used townhouse they bought in 2022 for $980,000.
It has a total floor area of 124㎡, so is a somewhat smaller abode than the 144㎡ New York state average.
Upon entering the front door, you come to their kitchen. It is a standard size and fit-out, with shelving etc. renovated from scratch when the house was purchased. New refrigerators, dishwashers etc. have been installed built-in to save space and ensure the kitchen does not come across as a lived-in space.
They have BBQ equipment on their veranda, and sometimes have parties at home with it. Their basement has their washing machine and dryer, and is used for miscellaneous purposes like a storeroom such as to store detergent, and as the husband’s hobby cellar. They sometimes hang their baby clothes up inside, since they cannot be put in the dryer.
Their garage has a refrigerator and freezer for foods they use less frequently, their baby stroller, and daily necessities. Their car is parked under a car port in front of the garage door, and they apparently never park it inside this garage.
Upon going up to the second floor, there is a child’s room and live-in nanny’s (maid/babysitter) room, and a bathroom complete with a shower area. The third floor is the couple’s bedroom, with the whole floor the main bedroom. It is complete with a walk-in closet, with the area to left in the image below the couple’s bathroom, and to further in to right the wife’s remote work and hobby area.
The house doesn’t have sufficient space for children to play freely, and they have just had their second child, so they are thinking of moving to a larger home in the suburbs once housing loan rates settle.
House of family with grown children
The next home belongs to a 39-year-old housewife who lives in Rockland Country, north of Manhattan. The family has a household income of $150,000, and is comprised of 6 people including her, her husband, and their 4 children. The house has a floor area of 195㎡ and was purchased for $470,000 in 2015, with 12 rooms, a garden/yard, pool, and detached garage.
This house is over 30% larger than the state average of 144㎡.
One of this house’s features is the play equipment and pool around the house, in place to enable larger children to play safely on the property. American families tend to have excellent play equipment at home to enable children to enjoy play and avoid the need for them going to parks for safety reasons.
Upon entering the front door, there is a living room for guests to left. There is then a large dining area where the whole family can eat together to right, with no TV in place in order to deliberately enable the whole family to communicate. However, they appear to often eat breakfast individually at the small table in the kitchen further in to right of the image below on busy weekdays.
The house has been completely renovated, with new home appliances, many of them built-in. American homes clearly use a lot of built-in installations to present available space as neat and tidy.
Upon going up the stairs, there is the couple’s main bedroom and walk-in closet, their 3 daughters’ room, they youngest son’s room, and a guest room. The bathroom does not have a bathtub. <Main bedroom>
<Youngest son’s room>
<3 daughter’s room>
The garage is used as a storeroom and a play area for their children. On rainy days they can engage in lacrosse practice in the garage, and on fine days play basketball outside. The home is thus a self-contained space where they can engage in all their play on their property without going to a park.
Values regarding the creation of space
Next, let’s take a look at the creation of space in the home. Unlike Japan, which has strict earthquake resistance standards, and newly constructed homes are preferred, used properties are typically purchased in the U.S. While only around 14% of used properties are on the market in Japan, around 80% of homes being traded in the real estate market are used in the U.S.
While used properties are not ideal homes in the beginning, American consumers customize them to their liking through renovating and DIY, and strive to increase the value of their investment to sell it at a higher price in future. Fathers/husbands who are good at DIY work are thus well appreciated.
Common DIY projects include replacing wallpaper, repainting, and reflooring. More fully-fledged projects include homes with fine wooden decks and home theatres with sound systems.
Let’s now take a look at some actual spaces.
[Creation of space with focus on the individual] Children’s (infant’s) room
Children in the U.S. are given their own room from around one month old. In some homes, the couple prepares the room as a joint effort before the child is born.
Even if the child cries during the night, the parent will check on it via a baby monitor installed in the crib, and won’t rush to it unless something is wrong. Children’s rooms and the parent’s main bedrooms are often far apart, with the idea to instill independence in the child through training them to sleep through the night by themselves from a young age.
[Creation of space with focus on the individual] Dad’s space (Man caves)
In addition to dedicated children’s bedrooms, and kitchens designed to the wives’ tastes, there are also dedicated husbands’ rooms called “man caves”. Around half of American men apparently have a man cave – a space set up to enjoy watching sports in, playing games, and engaging in hobbies in, which is sometimes used to invite male friends over to enjoy male-only time.
In the case of the home below, the man cave has several benches in front of a wall-mounted TV monitor, and is even replete with its own refrigerator. During the American football season, men from the neighborhood typically gather to watch games over beer.
[How garages are used]
As seen in the two homes we introduced in our virtual home visits, garages are used in a variety of ways other than for their original purpose as garages. In sunny California in particular, people typically park without any cover, on their on-property driveways on-street.
Garages are thus utilized as storerooms, a play for their children to play, gyms etc. to suit the family’s needs.
Values regarding lifestyle
Lastly, we’d like to examine values regarding lifestyle from the perspective of American consumers’ daily schedules.
American consumers place importance on their own time and time with family/friends, so tend to use nannies and actively outsource housework when their families grow. According to a survey by a major babysitter matching site, 74% of American homes ask for babysitters once or more a month. Aside from childcare, they also ask for help with housework including cleaning and cooking, and sometimes even ask high school students they know in the neighborhood for help instead of professionals. This appears to be driven by the idea that married couples’ relationships and connections with friends are important even after their children have been born.
The newlywed woman in New York state we introduced in our virtual home visit employes a live-in nanny. It is clear from her schedule she leaves the housework and childcare up to the nanny on weekdays.
It has thus become common for people to outsource housework others can also do and simple child care to secure time to play with their children while working, as well as to go on dates as a couple of a weekend.
Unique values are also apparent in the selection of cars in the U.S., a car-driven society. According to their bureau of statistics, over 92% of homes own one or more cars, with the number of electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) and their charging spots in particular increasing year by year. In California in particular, where the state government has mandated the sale of ZEVs and is placing emphasis on the development of infrastructure, there are approximately 4 times as many registrations as in New York state.
In the case of the woman living with her husband in California state, she uses an EV to pick up/drop off her children from elementary school and commute to work.
She only drives in urban areas and charges it once a week using the spot set up on the driveway in front of her house. While the car needs to be reverse parked, something American consumers are loathe to do, the fact it can be charged with less stress than a gas stand is deemed worthwhile. However, they use their EV and her husband’s gasoline car for different purposes, using his car on weekends for when travelling longer distances, and for picking up/dropping off children with their kids’ baseball practice, when the car needs to transport a heavier load.
American consumers are thus characterized by rather than taking care of everything with the one car, as was seen in this article, using several cars depending on the setting – EV compact cars that are good at stopping and starting and maneuvering tight turns for urban areas, and gasoline SUVs for when they have lots of luggage or are travelling long distances to their destination.
While those of us living in Japan have opportunities to look inside American consumers’ homes in movies and TV dramas, we may not have wondered why the living areas and floor plans they live in are the way they are, or how they choose their homes.
The detailed “9-Country Life Event and Asset Survey (conducted in March 2022)” report including American consumers introduced in this article is available for download below: https://www.global-market-surfer.com/report/detail/152/
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