Loft living is getting to be the preferred home choice for the urban work from home professional. It is the fastest growing alternative niche in new housing trends. In places like San Jose were the redevelopment is limited to smaller lots of land these lofts offer more affordable space with soaring ceilings and huge windows.
Loft prices vary but can be comparable with similar-sized, existing, single-family detached homes. In Silicon Valley, Regis Homes’ Market House Lofts, for example, sold for about $325,000 for lofts with one upstairs space to about $450,000 for lofts with two upstairs spaces for a total 1,500 square feet. But these same lofts are now selling for well over $500,000 and the sellers typically have multiple offers.
“If you have to live in a multifamily or high density housing, it’s a coolness factor, a hipness factor and it works,” says Mark Ritchie, president of Ritchie Commercial.
“As fast as you can build them you sell them. Anyone who has a choice, builds lofts,” says Ritchie, whose company developed a temporary side venture marketing and selling lofts in Oakland’s Jack London Square and other areas where commercial properties were being transformed into lofts.
The loft supply in the West Coast has been limited by the scarcity of older commercial and industrial buildings suitable for conversion, so developers are constructing more of them from the scratch with all the amenities of a new home - granite counter tops, wood flooring, stone-look or, rough brick walls and wrought-iron fixtures.
Buyers should be aware that some properties have been marketed as lofts, but are designed without the typical “loft” or open mezzanine second level. They look more like large open studios, rather than having a true loft open lower level or soaring ceilings of 18 feet or more. The key loft feature is the mezzanine structure or platform forming a second level or loft over a section of the main floor below. Lofts will often retain the industrial look and feel of the original building with exposed beams, ducts, and plumbing as well as corrugated steel and concrete flooring or masonry walls.
“It’s becoming just a marketing moniker. Some builders color open space units as lofts because they have an open kitchen, but they are just apartments. There are no grammar police when it comes to lofts,” says Ritchie.
While some decide to leave the original loft features alone many loft dwellers decide to add their own design touches. Darkening ceilings help to manipulate a loft’s towering sense of scale and suspending translucent screens or other materials personalize and add definition to spaces without losing the big-window light and wide openness that help to make lofts attractive.
“A lot of first-time buyers, and buyers in general, are unsure what lofts are about. Lofts appeal to a cross section of the buyer and rental market, including younger people looking for their first home, working couples, and the more sophisticated older couple that doesn’t want the hassle of caring for a yard and maintenance of a large house,” said Jim Mager, office manager of Urban Bay Properties/Lofts Unlimited.
