Find your Home
We pride ourselves to being in the business of finding your home. As a matter of fact, JSK slogan is “Leading you Home”. Home is the best place there is to almost everyone. It’s “home” where you are at ease. It’s “home” where memories with your family are built. It’s “home” where your most cozy sofa is. It’s “home” where your bed with your comfortable pillows are. We find you an apartment or a house and you transform it into home by turning it into your nest and your family nest.
List of Requirements
Every agent has a list of questions with every new client- a prospect form that the agent must fill in. Some of the questions on the prospect form include the following: Are you buying for investment purposes or are you going to live in this new home? Are you looking for a primary or secondary residence? What list of must-haves do you have? A master bedroom with a bathroom and walk-in closet? A maid room? A separate family room outside of the salon area?
Those questions are crucial to understanding your client requirements and narrowing down the matching listings.
Coronavirus outbreak is expected to expand the list of requirements that agents are going to receive. Those requirements may include a home office, a home gym or an area to exercise as well as an extra emphasis on the infrastructure needed to have proper internet connection. A functional kitchen has always been on the list of requirements of many clients, but more so nowadays.
Working from Home
With COVID-19 spreading throughout the world, working from home increases social distance and gives you the best chance to avoid contracting the virus. Some local and state governments are urging all non-essential businesses (and employees) to stay home to slow the spread of the disease.
During the Coronavirus outbreak, people have quickly adapted. We’ve set up home offices, our children are jumping into Google Classrooms, we’ve ramped up virtual conferencing, and we’ve scribbled together guidelines for this new remote workforce. Our day-to-day culture as we knew it simply vanished.*
When social-distancing ends, one thing is for certain: every business will devise a clear and robust plan-B that involves working from home. And in many cases, businesses will experiment more and more for this plan to become their plan A. Traditional offices have been questioned by many industries for a while now and this will be the case for more and more industries.
How does this link to our discussion of list of requirements when finding you a home? Well, a home-office will become a necessity and no longer a plus. In Lebanon, the trend of having a maid-room has been a very strong one for the past 10 years. I see that shifting out given the economic struggle of Lebanon (even before COVID-19 outbreak) and a shift will be made for a home office instead. A home office is either a small separate room or a revised floor plan of an-already existing room with the added functionality of an office.
Exercising from Home
Many reputable residences already include a common gym area for its residents, sometimes a swimming pool or a tennis court. Residents having access to such facilities within the reach of their residences appreciated those extra features. But what has changed now after the Coronavirus outbreak.? As social distancing is now recommended, the gyms were in fact among the first activities to be closed down when any country decided to go into a lock down. The lockdown was typically planned through phases and the gyms and schools and restaurants were almost always among the first wave of lockdowns. Well, a common gym at your building is the same as an outside gym. It is preferable not to access it as you will be sharing the different materials with other residents – potentially exposing the people sharing the gym for contamination of the virus.
Hence Home gyms! Gyms inside Home may be the next trend now. With smart TVs and the right connection, this may simply mean a yoga mattress, a couple of weight dumbbells and you follow one of the thousands of exercise sessions available on YouTube; or it may mean a small gym area within the apartment/house equipped with exercise items, TV, sound track and maybe a treadmill or an elliptical bicycle. What’s for sure, buyers will be visualizing a place in their home for work and exercise going forward.
Cooking from Home
A good kitchen was a requirement for many buyers already. The majority of us had a trend of life that implied eating out. Eating out has shrunk at the moment to delivery if any. As a matter of fact, Restaurants Tourism & Travel may be the sectors most affected by this crisis. People are estimated to have moved from as high as 70% eating out ratio (dining-out or delivery) to less than 10% eating out (delivery only). Majority of people are opting to eat at home. Kitchens are being used more and more and hence a functional kitchen may be more on the high-list of buyers going forward.
Like every pandemic before it, Coronavirus will end. What will define us, is how we embrace this moment of rapid change and whether we seize the opportunity to accelerate down a path we were all already on – virtualized business operations.* We are almost sure that life will not be exactly the same going forward. Real Estate will be impacted like most other businesses. The requirements of both buyers and sellers will adapt as well to the new realities. Agents have to be prepared to accompany their clients – both sellers & buyers into this new journey!
*Source: Property Base
