Model home merchandising is blatant manipulation. It is a “smoke and mirrors” slant on interior design intended to showcase the positive attributes of an otherwise average living space, obfuscate its blemishes, and directly appeal to a specific demographic. A successfully merchandised product will stun you with its beauty, bring desires to the fore of which you weren’t even aware, and potentially leave you emotionally, and financially, spent. It isn’t nefarious – it’s just business, but, it is an enormous component of what makes a builder/developer prosperous.
Model home merchandising has been extremely lucrative for me and, I in turn, for the many builders for whom I have worked. I, therefore, am not speaking disparagingly of either my previous endeavors or my former employers. I simply wish to enlighten serious home shoppers – not those who visit newly opened developments hoping to discover the latest interior design trends before making a bee-line to HomeGoods – that they have been painstakingly and very thoughtfully targeted.
House plans for free standing structures, town homes, and condominiums are each designed to address a particular void in the housing market. That “void” has a profile:
- a gender
- an age range
- a marital status
- a probable number of children
- a probable vocation/vocations
- a total household income
- a probable religious affiliation
- hobbies, and
- specific interests.
The layout of the proposed residence and its square footage reflect whether the potential purchasers are:
- first time buyers – single or newly partnered with, perhaps, one child
- move up buyers – more household income with a growing family
- second home buyers – established with substantially more household income and fewer residing children, or
- downsize buyers – empty nesters and/or retirees with a stable or fixed income
with options available to up-size, customize, and upgrade. The entire process of determining the market and developing a product to satisfy its needs has, thus far, been strictly statistics compiled by in-house marketing divisions of larger entities or outsourced to marketing firms by smaller concerns and later interpreted by architects working within the parameters of that data. It is all very dry and devoid of the one important aspect that really drives sales – emotional appeal. Exploiting that is the task of the model home merchandiser.
How the builder selects the merchandiser is the topic of my next post.
