The UK is notorious for building homes with tiny rooms in my experience. I've often felt personally that the housing market there is too obsessed with bedroom count as a metric for comparison rather than actual usable square footage.
My father's house in the UK was built in last 10 years and promises 5 bedrooms, I've often thought that knocking this down to 3 and making reasonable sized rooms would have made for a much nicer home. I imagine it also would have knocked however many thousands off the seller's asking price as well though...
I'd really like to know the reasoning for that as well.
I was in the market for a year and was interested in something outside of a city. I could afford the larger 5 bedroom homes, but had absolutely no use for that amount of space. Nice 2 bedroom homes in the suburbs just aren't a thing for some reason. Smaller homes exist, but the quality drops dramatically.
Perhaps there is an untapped market for high quality 1-2 bedroom homes outside of cities. I'd certainly buy one.
10m^2 is probably too small for many people, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some inflection point where the marginal cost of upkeep outweighs the marginal utility of additional space. As an absurd example, would you want to live in a house the size of Montana, and be responsible for all of the maintenance, or would you prefer something more human-scale, like a 40-bedroom mansion?
I'm personally tired of only having a choice of multi-bedroom apartments wherever I go. I would love to get a small one bedroom loft thats cheap and low maintenance but all the housing is setup for families.
Another strange thing to me is the ridiculous number of bedrooms in new single family homes, and the assumption that more is better.
Sites like Zillow don't even let you put an upper limit when searching. Agents can't believe you don't want a bigger place. I don't mean cheaper, I mean I don't want all those rooms and stairs. In my area, you perversely have to go to the ultra-luxe range of the market to get a high quality 2-3 bedroom single family home, while 5 bedroom new constructions are a dime a dozen. That makes no sense.
It's not the tininess of the box, it's the overflowing wealth of opportunities for profit and for experience provided by the surrounding city. Most people want to live in such conditions, and judge the smallness of the private living space to be a reasonable tradeoff.
There is a reason that those wealthy people only visit their holiday homes and don't simply move to the remote places where they are located.
> also could be a sign that, despite similar square footage, people don't see townhouses/apt housing product as the same sort of value as a detached house, and they are willing to make remarkable life changes to own a fee simple house proper.
That seems unlikely since townhouses and the like have been quite popular in places outside the U.S. where they're reasonably common. Detached single homes are incompatible with dense urban living, and this will always limit their popularity.
I see this as a serious gap in most places. They are building loads of apartments near me- all one or two bedrooms. It's very rare to see a three bedroom, and almost never four.
But it just isn’t a thing. Surely the margins would be decent? The demand must be too low.
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