Following the 2021 Women in Residential Construction Conference, Deryl Patterson, president of Housing Design Matters, shares her top marketing tools for fellow females buying, selling, or designing houses in an active market.
In a traditionally male-dominated field, Patterson says anywhere from 70% to 90% of homebuying decisions are made by women, so building and design solutions accommodating a female demographic can attract a target audience of working and family women.
As a mother of three children and an architect who worked too many crazy hours, I could relate to other working women and the unique stress working moms live with. And it turns out I was not alone. According to the US department of labor, 70% of all mothers with children under 18 work. Pre-Covid, that was more 70.5 million women. Balancing career and family means sometimes our houses aren’t pristinely clean. One working mom and interior designer told me her idea of housekeeping was low level lighting.
One of the key goals when designing for families is to keep the peace. For example, one of my working mom rules is to never make the mother walk past her kids’ bedrooms on the way to the owner’s suite. If their rooms are messy – working mom guilt kicks in and no one in the house is going to get a good night’s sleep.
Following the same logic, we rolled out our Daily Lifestyle Solutions based upon the premise – what if our houses could make our lives easier?