good considerations from bankrate.com
Given the cold, dark and unpredictable weather, selling a home in winter requires more toil — from shoveling to holiday decorating — than it takes to sell in summer.
While the number of homebuyers drops in winter, those left hunting are generally a more serious group ready to make a deal now, brokers say. Meanwhile, competition drops as other sellers decide to pull their homes off the market and wait for spring.
“It is a myth that homes don’t sell in the winter,” says Leslie Mann, an agent with Hallmark Sotheby’s International Realty in Hopkinton, Mass. “We have been really busy.”
If you are ready to throw some winter open houses, here are a few tips to help home sellers enchant potential homebuyers in winter.
Crank up the heat: Cold houses don’t sell. If potential buyers shiver at your open house, they aren’t likely to stick around, let alone make an offer. This isn’t the time to save on the heating bill. Keep the thermometer at least at a steady 70 degrees. A cold house sends the wrong message. “It doesn’t need to be hot; it needs to be not cold,” says Ronald Phipps, immediate past president of the National Association of Realtors and principal broker with Phipps Realty in Warwick, R.I.
Get shoveling: Don’t let a little snow come between you and the next owner of your house. Get shoveling, and make sure the walkway is clear. If someone has to slip and slide their way into your house, you’ll lose the battle before they cross the front door.
Moreover, if you want buyers to attend your open house, make sure they have a place to park. This task can be challenging as snowbanks and drifts accumulate. Don’t clear just the driveway — shovel out some spaces on the street as well, says Rona Fischman, principal broker of 4 Buyers Real Estate in Cambridge, Mass. While you are at it, make sure you don’t wind up with big piles of dirty snow near the front door. “If they are concerned about breaking a leg, then they are not paying attention to your house in a good way,” she says.
Build a snowman: Nothing says “welcome to your new house” more than a Frosty in the front yard ready to greet potential buyers, Fischman says. And why not get creative here? You could dress him up in a Century 21 T-shirt — or whatever your agency of choice is — or even put the for-sale sign in his hands, she says.
Decorate, but don’t go overboard: Some Realtors suggest stripping a house of all holiday decorations to avoid turning off potential buyers. But that sends the wrong message. After all, buyers are trying to get a feel for whether your house could become their next home. If your house is cold, empty and sterile, that sends the wrong message, Fischman says.
But be careful here. This is not the time to go nuts with plastic lawn ornaments. It might be the season to stow Santa and his reindeer out of sight in your cellar, Mann says. She recalls taking a potential buyer to see a house where the owners had gone over-the-top with Christmas kitsch. “The buyer said, ‘I didn’t know the Griswolds lived here.’ It did not help them at all.”
Better to focus on some lighter, classier touches, such as wrapping a garland around the banister on the stairs or putting up a wreath. “It really makes the entryway pop,” Mann says.
Become a weather freak, and stay flexible: One thing you can’t control during the winter is the weather. It’s time to start tuning into The Weather Channel, at least while you’re trying to sell your house. When planning an open house, it’s better to be prepared for weather changes. If a big storm is headed your way, maybe it’s a good idea to reschedule for a new day or push a morning open house into the afternoon, Mann advises. Even if you can lure a few buyers out in the storm, a dark and dreary day is probably not the best backdrop for showing off your house. “You have to have some level of flexibility when selling in the winter,” she says.
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Why the Housing Market Is Slumping Despite a Booming Economy
interesting angle from NYtimes.com
Home prices are out of reach relative to incomes and mortgage rates. The big question for the economy is how the imbalance adjusts.
These should be happy times for the housing sector. The economy is booming, with more people working at higher pay, and with the sizable millennial generation reaching prime home buying age.
Instead, the housing market has gone soft, acting as a drag on the overall economy rather than as a force propelling it forward.
Sales of new single-family homes were down 22 percent in September from their recent high in November 2017, and existing home sales in September were down 10 percent. This tepid residential investment subtracted from G.D.P. growth in each of the first three quarters of 2018.
Home prices have not declined nationally, at least according to the most widely followed indexes. But their rate of increase has declined, and more and more home sellers are finding they must reduce asking prices to find a buyer.
Given how central housing is to the broader economy — it is the biggest driver of both wealth and indebtedness for most families, and its fluctuations have frequently been major factors in past booms and busts — this slump isn’t something to be taken lightly for anyone hoping the good times will last.
So what’s going on?
When you look closely at the data, it appears this paradox of a strong economy and a weak housing market is, at its core, an illustration of a fundamental rule in economics: If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.
Home prices in a given location are ultimately tethered to the incomes of the people who either live there or want to. But for much of the last six years, that relationship has come undone.
Nationally, personal income per capita has risen 25 percent since the end of 2011, while the S&P/Case-Shiller national home price index is up 48 percent (neither figure is adjusted for inflation).
The gap is even larger in the big coastal cities with high wages and booming job markets, but where legal and other barriers make it hard for builders to add to the supply of homes. In the San Francisco metro area, per capita personal income rose 40 percent from 2011 to 2017, while home prices rose 96 percent. Similar patterns are evident in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, New York and Washington.
In less high-flying markets, there was still a disconnect. In the Minneapolis area, for example, incomes rose 22 percent while home prices rose 46 percent.
Those rising home prices got help from years of very low mortgage rates, which put more expensive homes within reach for people at a given income level. Activity was also probably boosted by some bounce-back effect after the housing market crash of 2007-09, a result of pent-up demand for homes that were not bought while the market was collapsing.
Rates bottomed out in late 2012 at 3.31 percent for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. They have been moving upward in fits and starts since, including a full percentage point in the last year alone to nearly 5 percent — still low by historical standards, but high compared with the ultralow levels that had enabled these huge price gains.
There’s no doubt that demographics are favorable for housing demand. The peak birth year for millennials was 1990; it’s a group that is turning 28 this year and thus entering prime years for home buying. As it happens, 28 is exactly the median response in a Bankrate survey that asked adults for the ideal age to buy a home.
But that doesn’t matter if prices are out of reach relative to incomes. Moreover, lending standards have remained more rigorous than they were during the last housing boom, so it has been harder for people to stretch to buy a home. The inability of people to buy homes they can’t really afford is great news in terms of avoiding another crisis, but not so great for the near-term outlook for housing.
“Buyers can only stomach so many price increases until it gets unsustainable,” said Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at the online brokerage Redfin. “Prices reached a breaking point where buyers were fed up and started to consider other options,” she said, including renting and moving away from the expensive coastal
markets where prices are most out of whack with incomes.
As Economics 101 teaches, price movements are the way that supply and demand match up with each other. But in the housing sector especially, that adjustment can take a while.
In contrast with the stock market, where relatively unemotional traders are buying and selling shares every day and the market stays liquid, home purchase and sales decisions can take months and are deeply emotional for the participants.
What seems to be happening is that sellers are trying to cling to the spring 2018 prices that their neighbors received, while there aren’t enough buyers in late 2018 willing or able to pay those prices.
In a Fannie Mae survey of home purchase sentiment, the proportion of people who think it is a good time to buy a home has decreased significantly since the spring, to a net 21 percent from 29 percent. But so has the proportion who think it is a good time to sell, which has dropped to 35 percent from 45 percent.
You would expect, in a zero-sum transaction like a home sale, for those numbers to move in opposite directions. Instead, it seems that sellers are unhappily realizing that they aren’t going to get what they thought their house was worth six months ago, and buyers still think homes are too expensive.
That helps explain why transaction volume, especially for new houses, has fallen substantially while prices haven’t (at least yet). It’s a standoff. And the outcome of the standoff will, in the aggregate, play a role in shaping the future of the economy.
There is precedent for this, and it isn’t a happy one. In the last housing boom, new home sales peaked in July 2005, and home prices didn’t start declining until May 2006. It didn’t start to hurt the overall economy until December 2007, when the damage had spread through an overleveraged global financial system.
But that doesn’t mean this episode has to end in tears. Home prices are not nearly as out of line with incomes as they were then; speculative activity hasn’t been nearly as frothy; and consumer debt levels are considerably more measured.
“I think income growth will help us get out of this period,” said Robert Dietz, the chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders. “We’re probably looking at a period where existing home sales volume is flat to declining, and it now looks like 2017 was the peak year for transaction volume.”
A strong (nonhousing) economy makes it more likely that this housing slump will end without a steep 2008-style downturn. So does the basic reality that young adults are forming families and need a place to house them.
But in the meantime, it could be a soft few months or even years of standoffs between buyers and sellers, with the big question of which comes first: sellers who settle for less after recognizing that the price they thought they would get is beyond the reach of buyers, or incomes that catch up with a housing market that got a little ahead of itself.
Home prices are out of reach relative to incomes and mortgage rates. The big question for the economy is how the imbalance adjusts.
These should be happy times for the housing sector. The economy is booming, with more people working at higher pay, and with the sizable millennial generation reaching prime home buying age.
Instead, the housing market has gone soft, acting as a drag on the overall economy rather than as a force propelling it forward.
Sales of new single-family homes were down 22 percent in September from their recent high in November 2017, and existing home sales in September were down 10 percent. This tepid residential investment subtracted from G.D.P. growth in each of the first three quarters of 2018.
Home prices have not declined nationally, at least according to the most widely followed indexes. But their rate of increase has declined, and more and more home sellers are finding they must reduce asking prices to find a buyer.
Given how central housing is to the broader economy — it is the biggest driver of both wealth and indebtedness for most families, and its fluctuations have frequently been major factors in past booms and busts — this slump isn’t something to be taken lightly for anyone hoping the good times will last.
So what’s going on?
When you look closely at the data, it appears this paradox of a strong economy and a weak housing market is, at its core, an illustration of a fundamental rule in economics: If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.
Home prices in a given location are ultimately tethered to the incomes of the people who either live there or want to. But for much of the last six years, that relationship has come undone.
Nationally, personal income per capita has risen 25 percent since the end of 2011, while the S&P/Case-Shiller national home price index is up 48 percent (neither figure is adjusted for inflation).
The gap is even larger in the big coastal cities with high wages and booming job markets, but where legal and other barriers make it hard for builders to add to the supply of homes. In the San Francisco metro area, per capita personal income rose 40 percent from 2011 to 2017, while home prices rose 96 percent. Similar patterns are evident in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, New York and Washington.
In less high-flying markets, there was still a disconnect. In the Minneapolis area, for example, incomes rose 22 percent while home prices rose 46 percent.
Those rising home prices got help from years of very low mortgage rates, which put more expensive homes within reach for people at a given income level. Activity was also probably boosted by some bounce-back effect after the housing market crash of 2007-09, a result of pent-up demand for homes that were not bought while the market was collapsing.
Rates bottomed out in late 2012 at 3.31 percent for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. They have been moving upward in fits and starts since, including a full percentage point in the last year alone to nearly 5 percent — still low by historical standards, but high compared with the ultralow levels that had enabled these huge price gains.
There’s no doubt that demographics are favorable for housing demand. The peak birth year for millennials was 1990; it’s a group that is turning 28 this year and thus entering prime years for home buying. As it happens, 28 is exactly the median response in a Bankrate survey that asked adults for the ideal age to buy a home.
But that doesn’t matter if prices are out of reach relative to incomes. Moreover, lending standards have remained more rigorous than they were during the last housing boom, so it has been harder for people to stretch to buy a home. The inability of people to buy homes they can’t really afford is great news in terms of avoiding another crisis, but not so great for the near-term outlook for housing.
“Buyers can only stomach so many price increases until it gets unsustainable,” said Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at the online brokerage Redfin. “Prices reached a breaking point where buyers were fed up and started to consider other options,” she said, including renting and moving away from the expensive coastal
markets where prices are most out of whack with incomes.
As Economics 101 teaches, price movements are the way that supply and demand match up with each other. But in the housing sector especially, that adjustment can take a while.
In contrast with the stock market, where relatively unemotional traders are buying and selling shares every day and the market stays liquid, home purchase and sales decisions can take months and are deeply emotional for the participants.
What seems to be happening is that sellers are trying to cling to the spring 2018 prices that their neighbors received, while there aren’t enough buyers in late 2018 willing or able to pay those prices.
In a Fannie Mae survey of home purchase sentiment, the proportion of people who think it is a good time to buy a home has decreased significantly since the spring, to a net 21 percent from 29 percent. But so has the proportion who think it is a good time to sell, which has dropped to 35 percent from 45 percent.
You would expect, in a zero-sum transaction like a home sale, for those numbers to move in opposite directions. Instead, it seems that sellers are unhappily realizing that they aren’t going to get what they thought their house was worth six months ago, and buyers still think homes are too expensive.
That helps explain why transaction volume, especially for new houses, has fallen substantially while prices haven’t (at least yet). It’s a standoff. And the outcome of the standoff will, in the aggregate, play a role in shaping the future of the economy.
There is precedent for this, and it isn’t a happy one. In the last housing boom, new home sales peaked in July 2005, and home prices didn’t start declining until May 2006. It didn’t start to hurt the overall economy until December 2007, when the damage had spread through an overleveraged global financial system.
But that doesn’t mean this episode has to end in tears. Home prices are not nearly as out of line with incomes as they were then; speculative activity hasn’t been nearly as frothy; and consumer debt levels are considerably more measured.
“I think income growth will help us get out of this period,” said Robert Dietz, the chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders. “We’re probably looking at a period where existing home sales volume is flat to declining, and it now looks like 2017 was the peak year for transaction volume.”
A strong (nonhousing) economy makes it more likely that this housing slump will end without a steep 2008-style downturn. So does the basic reality that young adults are forming families and need a place to house them.
But in the meantime, it could be a soft few months or even years of standoffs between buyers and sellers, with the big question of which comes first: sellers who settle for less after recognizing that the price they thought they would get is beyond the reach of buyers, or incomes that catch up with a housing market that got a little ahead of itself.
Here’s why buying a home during the holidays can save you big
interesting considerations from Bankrate.com
While holiday shoppers are obsessing over finding the ultimate gift deals, tenacious house hunters who buy a home in December compared with other times of the year will save the most money, according to a new study.
In fact, buying a home on Dec. 26 can save you as much as $2,500 on the sales price, according to an analysis from ATTOM Data Solutions. Nationwide, December held seven of the top 10 days where buyers snagged the best price discounts on a home purchase, making it the best month to buy a home, ATTOM revealed.
“Right around Thanksgiving, in particular, is a great time to [put in an offer] given that Dec. 26, 29 and 21 are all in the top 10 of best times to buy,” says Daren Blomquist, senior vice president of communications with ATTOM. He notes that it can take about 30 days from the time an offer is submitted to close a home sale. “It’s the housing market’s version of a Black Friday sale.”
The study looked at more than 18 million single-family home and condo sales from 2013 to 2017. To calculate the premium or discount paid on a given day, ATTOM compared the median sales price for home purchases closing on that day with the median automated valuation model, or AVM, price on the same homes at the time of sale. Here’s a look at the best days of the year to buy a home.
10 best days of the year to buy a home
1 Dec. 26
2 Dec. 7
3 Dec. 4
4 Dec. 29
5 Dec. 21
6 Dec. 1
7 Oct. 12
8 Nov. 9
9 Feb. 9
10 Dec. 8
The saying all real estate is local still applies when timing your home purchase. Buyers in warmer climates may not see as much of a price break during the holidays as those farther north where weather is more of a factor in keeping buyers on the sidelines, Blomquist says.
Negotiating a lower price isn’t the only good reason to buy a home during the holidays, real estate experts say. December is a month before the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes resume, says Leonard Steinberg, a real estate broker with Compass Real Estate in New York City. Mortgage rate spikes can add to your borrowing costs and put some homes out of reach.
“While everyone else is out celebrating and shopping — reducing buyer volume — those who shop [for a home] will be met by sellers willing to make a deal,” he says.
Danielle Hale, chief economist with Realtor.com, says that sellers may be more flexible about negotiating the closing date and paying for a home warranty to give buyers more piece of mind. You might also have more luck submitting a smaller earnest money deposit — something that’s less likely to fly when sellers are fielding multiple offers during busier times of year, Hale says.
If you find a house that meets your must-haves — especially when inventory in many markets is so limited — don’t let the holidays deter you from making an offer.
“With rate hikes and home-price increases on the horizon, there’s a lot to be gained by locking in your monthly payment now versus waiting until later.”
While holiday shoppers are obsessing over finding the ultimate gift deals, tenacious house hunters who buy a home in December compared with other times of the year will save the most money, according to a new study.
In fact, buying a home on Dec. 26 can save you as much as $2,500 on the sales price, according to an analysis from ATTOM Data Solutions. Nationwide, December held seven of the top 10 days where buyers snagged the best price discounts on a home purchase, making it the best month to buy a home, ATTOM revealed.
“Right around Thanksgiving, in particular, is a great time to [put in an offer] given that Dec. 26, 29 and 21 are all in the top 10 of best times to buy,” says Daren Blomquist, senior vice president of communications with ATTOM. He notes that it can take about 30 days from the time an offer is submitted to close a home sale. “It’s the housing market’s version of a Black Friday sale.”
The study looked at more than 18 million single-family home and condo sales from 2013 to 2017. To calculate the premium or discount paid on a given day, ATTOM compared the median sales price for home purchases closing on that day with the median automated valuation model, or AVM, price on the same homes at the time of sale. Here’s a look at the best days of the year to buy a home.
10 best days of the year to buy a home
1 Dec. 26
2 Dec. 7
3 Dec. 4
4 Dec. 29
5 Dec. 21
6 Dec. 1
7 Oct. 12
8 Nov. 9
9 Feb. 9
10 Dec. 8
The saying all real estate is local still applies when timing your home purchase. Buyers in warmer climates may not see as much of a price break during the holidays as those farther north where weather is more of a factor in keeping buyers on the sidelines, Blomquist says.
Negotiating a lower price isn’t the only good reason to buy a home during the holidays, real estate experts say. December is a month before the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes resume, says Leonard Steinberg, a real estate broker with Compass Real Estate in New York City. Mortgage rate spikes can add to your borrowing costs and put some homes out of reach.
“While everyone else is out celebrating and shopping — reducing buyer volume — those who shop [for a home] will be met by sellers willing to make a deal,” he says.
Danielle Hale, chief economist with Realtor.com, says that sellers may be more flexible about negotiating the closing date and paying for a home warranty to give buyers more piece of mind. You might also have more luck submitting a smaller earnest money deposit — something that’s less likely to fly when sellers are fielding multiple offers during busier times of year, Hale says.
If you find a house that meets your must-haves — especially when inventory in many markets is so limited — don’t let the holidays deter you from making an offer.
“With rate hikes and home-price increases on the horizon, there’s a lot to be gained by locking in your monthly payment now versus waiting until later.”
3-D Printed Houses Are Here and in High Demand
fun article on 3-D printed homes....from architecturaldigest.com
Cutting costs, saving time, and eliminating waste, the 3-D-printed house has officially arrived
For the past several years, talk of 3-D printing revolutionizing the way we build has been mostly just that—talk. But the promise of printing a habitable house, on demand, in virtually any location, is becoming a reality. Around the globe, teams of architects, engineers, and entrepreneurs have developed robotic arms capable of producing walls for a small home in as little as 24 hours, with essentially zero waste and for a fraction of traditional construction costs. Competing to develop the top technology, industry players are now engaged in a space race of sorts—literally so, in some cases, with NASA funding research for printing habitats beyond our planet.
Of more immediate, earthly interest was the recent unveiling of two of the first-ever homes to be printed on-site. At Austin’s South by Southwest festival this past March, the San Francisco–based nonprofit New Story presented a 350-square-foot prototype of the low-cost homes it hopes to build across the developing world. Just a month later, during Milan’s Design Week, architect Massimiliano Locatelli debuted a 1,100-square-foot residence of a decidedly more luxurious sort, with elegantly plastered interior walls, brass details, and stylish furnishings. These two projects—using similar technologies in which robotic arms extrude layers of a concrete mixture that harden into solid walls—represent opposing ends of the spectrum for this industry’s potential.
“There are over a billion people without adequate shelter,” says New Story cofounder Brett Hagler. “It’s a massive deficit, and traditional construction methods are not enough to make a dent. But 3-D printing promises significant decreases in cost and build time.” To date, New Story has completed close to 1,000 conventional houses in Bolivia, El Salvador, Mexico, and Haiti—where it is currently building a community with support from AD—with each home requiring around $7,000 and two weeks to finish. Using a 3-D printer developed with the company Icon, Hagler expects to reduce those numbers to $4,000 and just a couple of days. The charity’s first large-scale printed project will be 100 homes in El Salvador, slated for completion next year.
“We will be able to put a lot of creativity into the design based on a family’s current situation and their future dreams,” Hagler notes of the homes’ flexible layouts, which are determined by customizable CAD files. “We’re trying to have better aesthetics—something that’s too often ignored when it comes to the world’s poorest families.”
It’s precisely the aesthetics and creative potential that inspired Locatelli, cofounder of the firm CLS Architetti, to erect his 3-D-printed house in Piazza Cesare Beccaria. As he explains, the project was all about embracing the textures of 3-D-printed forms and “exploring the beauty of the new language.”
Realized in collaboration with concrete specialists Italcementi, the engineering firm Arup, and the Dutch mobile 3-D-printer maker CyBe Construction, the house took about a week to create, with production lasting roughly 48 hours. Consisting of four rounded volumes (living area, bedroom, kitchen, bath), all topped by a roof garden, “the shape was completely free compared to traditional architecture,” says Locatelli. “Go ahead, try to make a curved house with bricks or stone—it’s so complicated. With this you really can create new shapes.”
Locatelli says he has received numerous inquiries, including commissions for 100 homes near Washington, D.C., and a 10,000-square-foot house on Sardinia. And the owner of a Lake Como villa who had hired him to build a guesthouse switched gears after seeing the project in Milan. “He said, ‘I’m not going to build in stone anymore. I want the 3-D-printed house,’ ” recounts the architect, who is working with Arup on how to print multilevel structures—something that has never been done. “The relationship between architect and client is going to change so much,” says Locatelli. “Probably the architect is going to become a shrink, more or less, helping give shape to the client’s dreams.”
Cutting costs, saving time, and eliminating waste, the 3-D-printed house has officially arrived
For the past several years, talk of 3-D printing revolutionizing the way we build has been mostly just that—talk. But the promise of printing a habitable house, on demand, in virtually any location, is becoming a reality. Around the globe, teams of architects, engineers, and entrepreneurs have developed robotic arms capable of producing walls for a small home in as little as 24 hours, with essentially zero waste and for a fraction of traditional construction costs. Competing to develop the top technology, industry players are now engaged in a space race of sorts—literally so, in some cases, with NASA funding research for printing habitats beyond our planet.
Of more immediate, earthly interest was the recent unveiling of two of the first-ever homes to be printed on-site. At Austin’s South by Southwest festival this past March, the San Francisco–based nonprofit New Story presented a 350-square-foot prototype of the low-cost homes it hopes to build across the developing world. Just a month later, during Milan’s Design Week, architect Massimiliano Locatelli debuted a 1,100-square-foot residence of a decidedly more luxurious sort, with elegantly plastered interior walls, brass details, and stylish furnishings. These two projects—using similar technologies in which robotic arms extrude layers of a concrete mixture that harden into solid walls—represent opposing ends of the spectrum for this industry’s potential.
“There are over a billion people without adequate shelter,” says New Story cofounder Brett Hagler. “It’s a massive deficit, and traditional construction methods are not enough to make a dent. But 3-D printing promises significant decreases in cost and build time.” To date, New Story has completed close to 1,000 conventional houses in Bolivia, El Salvador, Mexico, and Haiti—where it is currently building a community with support from AD—with each home requiring around $7,000 and two weeks to finish. Using a 3-D printer developed with the company Icon, Hagler expects to reduce those numbers to $4,000 and just a couple of days. The charity’s first large-scale printed project will be 100 homes in El Salvador, slated for completion next year.
“We will be able to put a lot of creativity into the design based on a family’s current situation and their future dreams,” Hagler notes of the homes’ flexible layouts, which are determined by customizable CAD files. “We’re trying to have better aesthetics—something that’s too often ignored when it comes to the world’s poorest families.”
It’s precisely the aesthetics and creative potential that inspired Locatelli, cofounder of the firm CLS Architetti, to erect his 3-D-printed house in Piazza Cesare Beccaria. As he explains, the project was all about embracing the textures of 3-D-printed forms and “exploring the beauty of the new language.”
Realized in collaboration with concrete specialists Italcementi, the engineering firm Arup, and the Dutch mobile 3-D-printer maker CyBe Construction, the house took about a week to create, with production lasting roughly 48 hours. Consisting of four rounded volumes (living area, bedroom, kitchen, bath), all topped by a roof garden, “the shape was completely free compared to traditional architecture,” says Locatelli. “Go ahead, try to make a curved house with bricks or stone—it’s so complicated. With this you really can create new shapes.”
Locatelli says he has received numerous inquiries, including commissions for 100 homes near Washington, D.C., and a 10,000-square-foot house on Sardinia. And the owner of a Lake Como villa who had hired him to build a guesthouse switched gears after seeing the project in Milan. “He said, ‘I’m not going to build in stone anymore. I want the 3-D-printed house,’ ” recounts the architect, who is working with Arup on how to print multilevel structures—something that has never been done. “The relationship between architect and client is going to change so much,” says Locatelli. “Probably the architect is going to become a shrink, more or less, helping give shape to the client’s dreams.”
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