Data-Tracking, Trends, and Approaching Housing as a Product

Product development is a push and pull negotiation between two forces: market requirements and the product intent.

It's both cyclical and iterative.

A market gap is identified. A prototype is created. The market's response and feedback is gathered. The product is improved based on that feedback - it's made better, less expensive, more ergonomic, faster, lighter, tastier, healthier, whatever. The product is re-introduced...now new and improved!

Ideally, that chase to make the product better than it was the day before is endless. It’s a continual evolution towards something that's ultimately unachievable: the perfect product for its market, user, time and place.

That process makes sense in software. And video games. And packaged foods. And when new car models are released.

That iterative process of improvement in housing design hasn't been as effective. Actually, it could be argued that single family houses have, on the whole, gotten worse and less in-line with the needs, goals, and aesthetics of their market.

Why is that?

Because housing is seen less as an evolving product, and more as either a bespoke object or a commodity.

On the bespoke side of the spectrum, we have wholly custom home designers and architects. Selling services within this model requires that the product appears to be a 1-of-1 that has never existed before and will never be replicated. That's certainly never actually the case (every house, no matter how wolf, borrows from and builds upon the details and accrued examples of its precedents). Iterative and intensive product development is anathema to this mode of housing delivery. Repeatability, known design elements and known building science approaches undermine the designer's ability to sell against and charge for creating an object that's wholly unique.

On the other end, you have tract home developers. Housing is a commodity. The design is close enough to what people may want, but pretty much indifferent to what they need. Individual lifestyles or local context be damned. Why are there newly built colonial style homes in Phoenix?

Has product-market fit been achieved for the user? Not really, but when supply is short, buyers are often forced to get what they can afford, and squint to justify how well it works for them.

At HUTS, we see housing design and delivery through the lens of an innovative product development process. Unique to the circumstances, but not an endless output of prototypes. Predictable but not the same. Improved through qualitative feedback and quantitative data collection.

It's impossible to gather meaningful trends until you have a large enough sample set.

On the market side, we have a lot. We have several hundred thousand fans across our channels that have no problem telling us what a house should be, should cost, should include and how it should be delivered.

Then, almost 20k people have filled out our Get Started form, and described their house, for their location, what it should include and shared their vision and references.

On the product side, we needed a critical mass of builds to really understand our Standards home offering. Today, we have many dozens of home design and development projects emerging across the country. We've used those data points to build The Field Report, our synopsis of all the key data about our home products, and how they get manipulated by local context and real-world users.

What do we do with all of this real-world input? We interpret the trends and consider how to improve existing Standards, develop new ones and new features, and determine how to better communicate our solution for those looking for a better way to get a better house.