Some luxury homeowners are scaling back the number of bedrooms in a home to leave more space for hobby rooms and other amenities that can raise the property’s value, The Wall Street Journal reports.
But some real estate experts warn that fewer bedrooms could be a risk at resale.
“There’s always going to be a narrower market” for a home with fewer bedrooms, Javier Vivas, economic research manager for realtor.com®, told The Wall Street Journal.
In a recent analysis, realtor.com® found that luxury homes with more living space and fewer bedrooms often were listed at higher sales prices than comparable listings in those markets. However, those homes tended to take longer to sell. (The analysis factored in homes valued in the top 10 percent of a region’s market in the 50 largest cities.)
In 2016, the median size of a luxury home for sale was 4,706 square feet with five bedrooms (or about one bedroom per every 1,000 square feet).
Homes that boasted an increase in living space to bedroom ratio (more than 1,500 square feet per bedroom), on average, spent 117 days on the market. That is 15 percent longer than a standard home.
Homes with less than 750 square feet per bedroom, which often meant there also were more bedrooms in the home, tended to sell the fastest at 91 days on the market, the realtor.com® analysis showed.
Still, homes that offset bedroom counts with desirable amenities, such as larger entertainment spaces, can sell for higher amounts, Vivas says. Larger spaces to fewer bedrooms sold, on average, for $1.42 million, 31 percent higher than a luxury home with a standard number of bedrooms at $1.08 million. That is also 55 percent higher than luxury homes that had extra bedrooms ($915,000).
Source: “Some Luxury Homeowners Scale Back on Extra Bedrooms,” The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 9, 2017) [Log-in required.]
