Luxury housing market to be driven by sustainable homes, AI

investmentnews.com:

This year’s luxury housing market will be dominated by buyers clamoring for sustainable homes, according to a new Luxury Outlook Report from Sotheby’s International Realty.

Based on surveys from 550 of the company’s brokers around the globe, “sustainability showing up in mainstream considerations as part of the home search process feels different in 2024,” says chief marketing officer Bradley Nelson, who spearheaded the report. “These are conversations that didn’t happen on a daily basis in 2020.”

Luxury home buyers are indicating that they’re concerned with two issues, according to the report: whether the house is located in a higher-risk area and whether a house has been built with environmentally conscious considerations in mind, the latter of which can include eco-friendly heating systems or garages with charging capabilities for electric cars.

“There’s either a general consciousness of your environmental impact through homeownership,” Nelson says, “and where you are at risk from a changing environment and how that impacts the real estate you acquire.”

Buyers in Southern California, for instance, now ask about a house’s wildfire risk as a matter of course, according to the report. In hurricane-prone Puerto Rico, luxury homes will often now come with solar panels. Buyers “will pay more for a home in line with environmental goals,” the report says. 

A new generation of buyers “are coming into the market where [sustainability] is highly important to them,” Nelson says. Sotheby’s agents, he continues, predict that “you’ll continue to see sustainable properties generate premiums in the future.”

Not all luxury properties are created equal. Buyers around the world, Nelson says, show a strong preference for turnkey