Weird Design = Lower Prices
Friday October 23, 2009
Wanna luxury house for a bargain price? Look for architectural oddities. Forbes Magazine teamed with Realtor.com, Sotheby's Realty, and Christie's Great Estates to find ten truly bizarre houses for sale, and they found that the weirder the architecture, the lower the prices. Turns out that features like underground tunnels and hydraulic lifts are a real drag on home values. The moral? Hold your creativity in check when you build or remodel.
Comments
Hi Jackie – I gotta disagree completely with your “moral”. It’s convention and conformity that drags value down, because it celebrates the bland and devalues the unique.
We’ve become a society obsessed with home value so we’re constantly moving; we are more concerned with what the next guy thinks of our house than we are how it supports our unique lifestyle.
This article didn’t get to the real question – do these owners care that they don’t get the high ROI that their more conventionally-minded did? I’m guessing they don’t; I’m guessing they value the unique experience of living in these homes far more than the cash they get at closing!
Keep up the good work!
Richard Taylor, AIA
Ms. Craven, thank you for posting this story. However, Mr. Taylor is correct in his comments. My husband and I love our Lighthouse in Deer Isle, Maine. It is our dream home. We will very much miss it, but we have to part with it for health reasons. We just hope that we can find somebody who will appreciate its beauty as much as we do!