“The Baby Boomers are buying condos now and they don’t want to downsize too much. They only want a few bedrooms, but they want them to be big and have their own bathrooms because the extra bedrooms may be for visiting kids, a caretaker or an elderly parent. And, the rooms have grown to fit their larger things. Kitchens have bigger appliances and a lot of them. Family rooms and master bedrooms must fit today’s huge TVs.”
– Gopal Ahluwalia, vice president of research at the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), quoted in the Chicago Tribune
A pretty lively conversation raged earlier this week in this discussion thread about whether downtown condo developers are building too many large two- and three-bedroom condos, and neglecting to build one-bedrooms.
Although it deals mostly with suburban buyers, an article in today’s Tribune observes that baby boomers and empty nesters tend to favor large condos, and as a result, condos are growing. According to the NAHB, the average condo size grew 16 percent between 1999 and 2008, from 1,360 to 1,577 square feet. Over that same period, single-family homes grew at a more modest rate of 12 percent.