Real Estate Location is Being Redefined by Lifestyle Amenities
What do short distance, safety, and time savings, all have in common? Answer: they are rewards of selecting the right location that meets the lifestyle amenities for my next home search, and my last one. Let me explain:
This is going to sound strange. But the best thing I liked about my old house was not the architecture, or the swimming pool, or the atrium in the kitchen.
It was the fact that the house was located 1/2 mile from a movie theater.
Hey, I love the movies and going every week is an important part of my lifestyle, and I loved the short drive to the theater.
Now while I love car crashes and chase scenes inside the movie theater. I certainly don’t like them outside the theater, for example, on the same road that I’m driving on.
And you know, it’s not any safer out there. You’ve got to contend with texting teens, drunk drivers, people who think they’re in second place at the Daytona International Speedway, AND drivers who think that because they are driving a SUV, they can plow at normal speeds through snow, rain and wind.
Progressive Insurance once polled 11,000 policyholders in 2001 who had experienced accidents. Sixty-nine percent of those accidents took place within 10 miles from home. Ten miles from home!
Here’s the next point to ponder. Since then I have moved away from a movie theater, and now, it’s a 20 minute drive. Sometimes I don’t go! My wife sees my anguish and suggests, “Why not just rent a movie from the cable company?”
Rent a movie?? Sit at home?? How is that a movie-going experience? I want to be wearing my 3-D glasses, sitting next to my fellow film buffs in a huge, dark space, laughing, crying and slurping down $5 sodas surrounded by head-pounding Dolby speakers with my feet stuck to the floor. That’s how you watch a movie.
You probably already know this, but it is worth repeating: It’s a key reality of human behavior. The further away you are, the less likely you are to engage in that activity. For consumers considering their lifestyle amenities, this will be a major factor to them.
Thirdly, there’s the time issue. In today’s hyper-drive mode of living, we ALL need to spend more time with our family and friends and less time sitting at traffic lights, driving around detours, and getting our cars repaired.
As a real estate agent, proximity to the places home buyers love is an emotional hot button. If your prospect likes to run in the park every day, or visit church functions at night, or needs to go to a chiropractor three times a week, or maybe prefers a certain type of latte, it’s a smart idea to point out those lifestyle amenities.
This is why the developers of SpatialMatch decided it was not only important to list millions of bits of hyper local lifestyle activities in its lifestyle search tool, but to also provide a distance feature that clearly illustrates how far each amenity was located in relation to residential properties. As a real estate agent, you can feature this technology right on your website.
A home buyer can pick each business or facility they know they will be visiting regularly. Then, using SpatialMatch’s handy distance slider, they can quickly gain a visual understanding of where all these lifestyle amenities will be relative to where they are looking to live.
Bottom line, an ordinary house can all of a sudden become the extraordinary place to live not only because of its square footage, or awesome closet space, or the garden in the back yard, but also because its location will optimize the time your clients spend outside of the house.
Recognizing that the home sale is beginning to include conversations about exact distances to places the buyers will frequent is an important step in services for today’s more comprehensive buyers. SpatialMatch will easily and expertly deliver detailed information to you in real-time and with great ease. This will give both you and your buyers more time to take in a movie, and that can sometimes be what life is all about. Nice.
