The Goldilocks Quotient – How big of a Columbus home is ‘Just Right’ for you?

How small is the smallest home you could live in daily and still be comfortable? Is bigger always better? Is left over money at the end of the month a big enough incentive to simplify your housing needs? I like the idea of these tiny 100 square foot homes like the one in the video for places like that plot of land in Hocking Hills you just bought with a big pond and great views. While a tiny home may not always be practical, I hope that when you are contemplating the size of your next home that you stop to think about that ‘just right’ size. I’ll call it the Goldilocks Quotient. There, I just coined a new phrase.

Conventional wisdom around the country is that Buyers care less these days about getting the biggest house they can buy with their money and more about getting a house that’s just right and suits their needs.  It’s been said that Buyers are looking for greener options and homes that are more economically friendly to heat and live in on a daily basis. It’s not a new phenomena and I’ve written about it before.

Over the last Sixty Days in Columbus, the average square feet of  the 761 homes that sold was 1,550 and the median was 1,410 square feet. In the same time frame Ten years ago, the 1,419 homes that sold (!wow, nearly twice as many homes in the same period!) averaged 1447 square feet.  So maybe the average Columbus home that has sold on the market has gone down by about 100 square feet over the last ten years. It’s Columbus so many of the homes are in older established neighborhoods and the amount of room inside those homes is what was when they were built 20, 40 80 years ago. Ditto with inner ring suburbs like Bexley, Grandview and Worthington. These communities aren’t building tons of new homes which would be an interesting way to track Columbus Homebuyer requirements but they obviously offer bigger and smaller homes. A more detailed look into Columbus Home Buyers’ preferences over the years may tell us more than this cursory information but this post is more to get you thinking than it is stocked with data.