Tuesday, October 9, 2007

It's about the garage!

I just had the opportunity to wander through the October issue of REALTOR(R) magazine. Cars and Cable caught my eye (pg. 14). As I had previously mentioned in a blog post in July, oversized garages made a pretty good showing. Second place.

Now, before you go gloating about second place, keep in mind that first place was central air conditioning... which is pretty tough to beat, and almost everything on the market is already equipped. Also notable is that garages moved up from 5th place in the last survey (2004). And it is a HUGE jump. A full 56% of buyers said they were ready to spend premium money for an oversized garage this year, vs. only 6% in 2004.

Sure, SUVs have contributed to the desire to have a larger garage, but we have a car-centric culture. Americans LOVE their cars. And we love having a lot of them. And... we want to park them inside.

I'm not surprised... I'm just ahead of the curve.

When you are ready to step up to a big garage in Gwinnett County, I am the REALTOR(R) that knows garages AND houses.

2 comments:

Joanne Hanson said...

Even in my part of the country where we sell mostly second homes, garages are important for our buyers. They need a place to store skis, snowmobiles and boats! Unfortunately, with many condos they are hard to come by, but often people's goals are to move up to a place with a garage. It really is nice in snow country!

Anonymous said...

Like Joanne I work in a resort area where we have a lot of toys to store... the garge is a must. Our summer nights are cool enough that AC is only used about 5 days a year... and witth snow, skis, boats, 4 wheelers and all that we think we need... my clients find the garage important