Just from my POV: Their current home is the real competition

We spend a lot of time thinking about what people want in their next home. I keep wondering what would make them leave this one.

There’s a familiar logic to housing for people whose children have left home. The house is bigger than they need, the yard takes work, there are stairs and meanwhile, younger families desperately need those larger homes.

So we build a nice apartment. Everything's perfect: enough space, a good balcony, even an elevator. Parking. Maybe some shared amenities. Preferably somewhere green.

And then we start talking about whether people are ready to downsize.

I think we’ve already skipped a step.

Before I want to know what someone wants from their next home, I want to understand why they would leave this one. Because the competition for that new apartment isn’t necessarily the apartment another developer is building down the road.

It’s doing nothing. Staying home. And home has quite a head start: you know how it works, your things fit, you know the neighbors, the kids can stay over. There’s a table everyone fits around at Christmas and you don’t have to decide which possessions deserve to come with you. If you’ve lived there for twenty years, thousands of tiny routines have made the place easy without you even noticing.

A new apartment has to be better than all of that in some way that actually matters.

Better enough to move.

At some point the yard stops being worth the work. Maybe being able to lock the door and travel for two months becomes more appealing than having four bedrooms. Maybe friends start moving into the city. Restaurants, culture, and being able to walk places suddenly matter more than the garage. Maybe the family home gradually stops being the center of family life.

All of those things change the value of the home someone already has. And they won’t happen to everyone at the same age.

That’s why I find target audiences based mostly on life stage so unsatisfying. Two people can both be 62, own almost identical houses, and have roughly the same income, while one is already looking at apartments and the other would rather be carried out the front door.

The interesting information is in the difference between them.

If we really want to understand why people move to a smaller home, I think we should spend less time asking them to imagine the apartment they might want someday.

I’d rather start with the home they aren’t ready to leave yet. Escargot is a Capsule Creators Original that questions this subject all along. With a sharp eye on the real user.