Most of us are clinging to middle class status, yet we design buildings and spaces that are well beyond our personal budgets. I think most of us would easily say that we couldn't afford our own fees if we were to hire us to renovate our home. The Low end Residential market is by far the most bountiful resource for work. People can't sell houses, but life moves on. People need more space for babies, new spouses, the recent college grad. Residential Designers are not equipped to handle difficult structural/ spacial problems and often create simplistic dysfunctional solutions for complicated renovation projects. There is a real need for Architects in this area and the sole practitioner is a perfect fit.
When we focus our fee structures, list of services, and business models on the wealthy clients, then we economically isolate ourselves to a small market of wonderfully expensive projects. At the end of the day, Rolex does pretty good, but Walmart does better by selling to the masses. We have conditioned ourselves to think more documents are necessary for our own protection, yet providing more documents for a lawyer to sift through never helped anyone. We need to make our services available to middle class clients if we want our profession to make a real impact on society. Let's face it, the majority of Americans live in terrible houses and they fall in love with this garbage, so this is what they expect from buildings. It all starts with the home. I've explained in detail before how I've reduced my services to a good idea and a set of drawings for a permit for the pathetically small projects and have managed to make better money per hour than I do on commercial work. It's the concept of charging a minimum set up fee for small bare bones projects vs bundling many services for a discount for large swanky projects. The small projects are always affordable and available in quantity. Renovation clients are the people banks give $100K loans to all day long. This is unaccounted for in the "housing starts" stats, but it's out there, everywhere. Don't be afraid of designing in your neighborhood. All of us should be as a community service effort.
Every day I encounter people in the housing industry that live in a world without Architects. I have a spec house renovator client that I'm "dating" right now that is a classic example of what's wrong with the standard housing development process in this country. Now I'm a believer in a true free market, but it's the spirit of amateurism that made our country great that allows the unqualified to make the decisions about what our built environment looks like. Now we have a lawyer and an accountant that are new to the game and they think they have it all figured out. Neither looks at beauty in terms of physical form, but rather in which house has sold the most units. These guys are always attracted to the worst new construction spec houses, so they want to renovate old houses in that "style". They worry about building a house that won't sell, so they look at the houses they find the most in the MLS listings. When they see a certain house sell many times, they see success and that's beautiful to them. This what I call chasing your tail. I quickly pointed out that these houses are always selling $100k less than my unique spec houses because they are mass produced. No one wants to live in the same house as their neighbor, we just give them little choice. This is also how terrible designs keep being perpetuated. They mistake over saturation of a bad design for market desirability.
The deciders about our built environment are often people just like this who could care less if they're selling houses, fish, hot tubs, or urinal cakes. It's just a commodity to many of the people that buy properties to develop them, so I like to meet these people and educate them. If we want to win over the hearts of the masses, then why are we mostly designing for the wealthy few? We must bring good design to the regular home owner and we'll expand our profession and raise our worth. If we can get builders to start competing with quality, then we'll become valuable quickly. Right now competing with quantity isn't going to work, so I've already seen home builders in my area changing course. These guys found me because I design spec houses and they sell well. There is no other way to test your worth at market, so embrace the horrible spec builders and change them. This is a great opportunity for us to insert ourselves into this sector and start raising the design bar from the bottom up. Give them a minimal fee for the minimal amount of work and you open the door to a huge wealth of opportunities you could have never participated in before. The best part of this type of work is the extremely low bar of expectations. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.
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Eric Rawlings AIA
Owner
Rawlings Design, Inc.
Decatur GA
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