Billfold Housing Survey: What Is Your Dream House?

This week, we’re looking at the results of our Billfold 10-Question Housing Survey. Today, we’ll take a look at our last two questions: is owning a home a smart financial decision, and what do survey respondents consider their “dream house?”

I wasn’t surprised by the way people responded to the first question — in fact, I would have been surprised if most of our readers hadn’t chosen the “it depends on where you are financially” answer. I was, however, surprised by the way people responded to the dream house question. Full results after the jump:

I changed the chart display on this one so we could see all of the answers more clearly. It does distort perception just a little bit; right now the visual bar looks like an overwhelming majority of respondents picked “it all depends on where you are financially,” and in reality only 59 percent of respondents made that choice. A majority, to be sure — and exactly how I predicted a lot of Billfold readers would respond — but not an overwhelming majority.

People who responded “other” did so to clarify why they thought a home was or wasn’t a smart financial decision — maybe it wasn’t a smart decision in their city, maybe they were waiting to be in a better financial position before buying — and my favorite “other” responses were from the people who wrote that buying a home was a smart financial decision if you had dogs. I just love the thought of all of you getting home from work and heading to the backyard to play with your dogs. Here, one more Up-themed GIF for good measure:

Maybe that’s why 35 percent of you picked “old rambling home, lots of pets and soup pots and enough room for friends” as your dream house. I was seriously expecting more of us to want the sleek minimalist space, because we are Children of The Future and we are supposed to have efficient smarthomes that light up when we arrive and wag their tails because they’re so happy to see us… no, wait, that’s dogs again, I’m still thinking about dogs.

Many of you who filled in “other” for your dream house wrote about brownstones, townhouses, and — you guessed it — apartments. For some of us, our dream house is a rental.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Billfold 10-Question Housing Survey. If you’d like to see more surveys from us in the future, let us know. Now that I’ve test-driven this one, we’ll be able to use what we’ve learned to make future surveys better — especially in terms of response choice — as well as more useful to Billfold readers.

I hope that all of us get our dream houses, our dream apartments, and our dream dogs someday.

This survey is part of our Real Estate Month series.

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