The K. Hovnanian-built house in Natomas has a standard-size bedroom and a surprisingly large great room that combines a kitchen and living room. But that's about it for 817 square feet - likely the smallest new house for sale in Sacramento. Price: $126,000.
Home Front discovered this seventh wonder of the real estate world via colleagues who got builder postcards aiming to pry boomers out of Land Park and east Sacramento and into Four Seasons in Natomas.
Seeing the house - very livable, but suited, pet wise, for a fish tank or bird cage - raised a question of why builders don't add more of these into their sales mix? This house was a bit of a fluke; a handful of them were built for irregular lots. Sales consultant Dee Elrod said there are no plans for an entire tract of these. The company didn't offer comment.
But an Internet search revealed that KB Home recently tried something similar, selling 880-square-foot homes in Houston for $64,000. The idea was to compete with bank repos. But 1,200 square feet is likely to be the smallest KB house that Northern Californians see, said KB spokesman Craig Lemessurier.
Today, an 800-square-foot home makes a novelty item in a real estate column. But once this was the norm. The 2002 book "Affluenza" says homes in the pioneering New York suburb, Levittown, were 750 square feet in the 1940s. Average size grew to 950 square feet in the 1950s and to 1,350 square feet by the 1970s, the book states.
In 2003 in the Sacramento region, average home size peaked at 2,612 square feet, according to statistics from the Gregory Group, a Folsom consultant. Average size is now about 2,375 square feet. Ask home builders what's ahead and they all say smaller still.
Downsizing - say to 1,200 square feet or 1,400 square feet for first-time buyers in the Sacramento region - is a routine effect of recession, history shows. But it also happens when buyers hew to an old-fashioned rule of real estate: buying at a price three times their annual household income. Builders say buyers have to toe that line now. They can't get loans to buy higher.
"I just think smaller houses fit into the new profile," said Kevin Carson, a former John Laing Homes executive and president of the Sacramento division for the New Home Co. based in Orange County. Carson targets move-up buyers. Yet he says, "There won't be the mini mansions that were built so much five years ago."
Indeed, many big boom-time houses have proved foreclosure-prone, expensive to cool and vulnerable to frightening drops in value. For a long time to come they'll be monuments to the euphoric era that built, financed and sold them.
Meanwhile, nothing marks a new era as abruptly as an 817-square-foot house. Obviously, it can be done - and done well. The question is: why isn't more of it being done?
Call The Sacramento Bee's Jim Wasserman, (916) 321-1102 or email him at [email protected]. Read his blog on real estate, Home Front, at www.sacbee.com/blogs.