Finding a Use For the Languishing McMansion

There has certainly been a revival in housing sales over the last few months; condos and single family dwellings have been experiencing increased sales as the government has supported stimulus spending into real estate to help the economy along. However, seemingly left out of this real estate recovery has been the style of home that appears to be the inanimate mascot for the whole bloated mortgage and lending fiasco.

The drive for homeowners to purchase bigger and "better" homes well beyond their financial means is one of the suggested causes of our current economic climate and resultant real estate crash. As a result, there is a plethora of architectural behemoths on the market with no one interested in buying them, particularly not for the price that owners are looking to sell them for.

In our economic downfall, smaller homes are being snatched up while larger ones are mouldering on the market. A smaller home that has enough space for your family without being extravagant is a wise choice in this current trend of high unemployment and economic strife. Smaller homes are cheaper to heat and cool, can cost less to maintain, have less square footage to keep clean, and have more intimacy due to less sprawling floor plans. It's no wonder that just like the Craftsman response to the monstrous Victorian architecture of the 19th century, there is a small home backlash going on now; there remains the problem of an excess of vacant large homes however.

Though many McMansions have seen a long stay on their local markets, some resourceful buyers are trying to find new uses for these bloated abodes. In some areas, McMansions are being disassembled and the pieces made into two homes to recycle the building materials. Some buyers are using the large homes as group homes for disabled or elderly residents; this option takes advantage of the proliferation of ensuite bathrooms and large industrial quality kitchens that many of these homes have. Some of these suburban mansions are also ideal to divide up for student housing or duplexes.

The one real roadblock to buyers making good use out of McMansions around the country is that of neighborhood zoning and protests from neighbors looking to protect their real or imagined property values. Many neighborhoods that are populated with these large-scale homes have residents who're concerned that alternate uses of other homes in their neighborhood are going to somehow be more damaging to their property values than the proliferation of bank owned homes already is; fortunately, that is unlikely to be the case. Hopefully, more of these monstrous homes can find buyers with ideas to make them useful again.