A rendering of a 412-square-foot home to be built on a 0.47-acre lot in Southbridge.
Tiny homes are nothing new in Massachusetts. After all, Henry David Thoreau built his 150-square-foot home in Walden Woods with $28.12 worth of materials back in 1845. It may be the trends of Baby Boomers retiring and downsizing, the heightened focus on energy efficiency, and skyrocketing housing costs are combining to create a tiny market for tiny homes.
In this case, “tiny homes” refer to stationary houses built on foundations on privately owned land. Many tiny homes are built on axles, so they can be easily moved from place to place. These are different from mobile homes, which aren’t, in fact, very mobile at all. Tiny homes built on axles are considered RVs and not real estate. Stationary tiny homes tend to be bigger – often much bigger – and have more amenities.
The tiny house movement hasn’t gotten much traction in Massachusetts yet, largely because the cost of land is so high and larger homes yield bigger profits for builders, so there’s less incentive for them to build small homes.
The 20 smallest single-family homes on the market during the first week of July ranged in size from 231 to 500 square feet and ranged in price from $49,900 to $669,000. If one could reassemble the median numbers into a single, fictional property, it would be a 407-square-foot, three-room house on a 0.375 acre-lot that had been on the market for 90 days at $124,450.
Many, but not all of the tiny homes currently on the market are old hunting camps in need of a lot of work, or seasonal beach shacks. As one would expect, all are more than an hour’s drive from Boston. One, a renovated 440-square-foot oceanfront cottage on Cape Cod, has been on and off the market since last fall for a whopping $669,000.
According to the Tiny Life website, run by tiny homeowner Ryan Mitchell, in Charlotte, North Carolina, two out of every five tiny house owners are over the age of 50. That’s exactly the market Ed Paquette, of Paquette Builders in Southbridge, is aiming for with the tiny houses he’s planning to build. He said he thinks they would be great for downsizing Boomers getting ready to retire and simplify their lives.
Paquette owns land on Alpine Drive in Southbridge that he divided into seven lots. He has plans to build tiny houses on three of them and larger homes on the others. The plans he has are for one 600-, one 412- and one 340-square-foot home, all under $200,000. All will be built on roughly half-acre lots, will run on electricity, have their own wells and septic systems, and will have to meet modern strict energy efficiency requirements.
“I think the plans will evolve and we’re open to modifications,” Paquette said. “I met with a few people on it so far. They’re less money, but it’s not a huge savings because of the land costs. I think it’s a great financial alternative for all the people who are going to be retiring.”
Some people look to tiny houses because they simply assume those houses will be instantly much cheaper than conventional houses – and they’re not. The savings with a tiny house come over the long term in reduced operating costs, according to Isa Bauer, lead designer and project manager for Tiny House Northeast, which makes and ships static and mobile tiny houses all over the northeastern United States.
“The land costs are a huge burden and the actual cost of the tiny house, appliances and other components are the same, but compact,” Bauer said. “It’s more expensive than the people looking into it expect. The benefit of the tiny footprint is the cost savings over time, like heating efficiency. The material savings on construction are small.”
Buying A Lifestyle
Paquette hasn’t built homes this small before, but he sees it as a growing trend for first-time buyers, retirees on fixed incomes and especially single people who want to own real estate and not rent.
Bauer said her company’s typical buyer has cost in mind, but they’re more focused on making an environmentally conscious decision to reduce their carbon footprint. Most of them are self-qualified and ready to get rid of most of their stuff.
“It’s a very complicated subject,” Bauer said. “The market for a tiny house tends to be younger people – like post-grads – who are also conservationists at heart. Sometimes they’re middle-aged people who are just looking to downsize. They’re hoping it will be terribly inexpensive and it just isn’t. In that way, they’re being misled by cable TV shows.”
The real estate agent Paquette hired to sell his homes, Mary Jo Remick, said the largest of the tiny homes has received the most interest, but none have sold in the six months she has been marketing them. She said new construction in her market is just starting to recover from the recession and she’s optimistic.
“I’ve had a lot of inquiries, mostly from single people, on the tiny properties,” Remick said. “It’s a new concept and people aren’t ready to pull the trigger. They wonder if they can downsize that much. I think when one is built and people can see it, they’ll be able to see themselves living there.”
Bauer said she often feels like she’s counseling her clients as she helps them navigate the decisions they have to make when designing the space that’s right for them.
“At 500 square feet you get to keep more of your hobbies, but at 250 feet you get to keep a pair of boots, a setting for four, one frying pan, one cooking pot, one suit and a pair of boots,” Bauer said. “Every square foot is assigned importance, though there is some multi-purposing. We really pay attention to people’s lifestyles. If you love to ski, that will become a priority.”
But, she said, that also means something else will have to go.
