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Comment by kurtosis | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you nearly 100%, but why do you think the market fails to recognize the higher value of such a home?

Custom-designed or heavily modified buildings tend to be quirky; they are designed around the particular tastes and requirements of the previous owners. Generic houses are more one-size-fits-all. They may not fit any particular person as well, but you know what you're getting and there are certain baseline expectations that won't be violated.

To some extent, people actually will pay for quirkiness. It can be easier to find a home you love in a neighborhood with a mix of houses of different ages and styles and owner-modifications. Old houses can be more valuable partly because they've been modified over the years to be more livable. But for houses that are farther from the norm, it's harder to match the right house to the right buyer.

(I say this as the owner of an 80-year-old house in Seattle with some very odd changes made by previous occupants.)

Indeed. If it's so much better, why doesn't anyone want it?

That's like asking (in 2006 after the Intel switch but before everyone heard of the iPhone), "If it's so much better, why doesn't anyone want a Mac?" Arguably, "the market" didn't even know what it was, much less why they should value one. It's not that no one wanted a Mac, it's that less than 1 in 25 did. If only 10 people went shopping, odds were none were looking at a Mac.

Folks like Lindal Cedar Homes spend money marketing livable homes as an experience, but the general population isn't yet aware of the benefits or why they should even desire such a home.

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