By John Burns, John Burns Real Estate Consulting

The lockdowns of the past year resulted in an accelerated adoption of technology that is unparalleled in my lifetime. Additionally, the renewed focus on flexibility and quality living 24/7 in our homes will change home design for the foreseeable future.

This is a really exciting time to be in the home design industry. The future is filled with opportunity for those ready to embrace it — and with significant disruption for those believing we will return to pre-COVID conditions. We are ready to embrace the future.

Here’s what I see coming:

• E-commerce Is Dead. Why? Because it is now called commerce. If you aren’t delivering phenomenal customer service online and in person, you are most likely a withering dinosaur. Like many other companies, including NKBA, our firm had already started on a website revamp, but now we’ve put an even greater focus on making it simpler for clients to do business with us. This is what clients want. It won’t improve profits today, but it will be a requirement over the long term.
• Mergers and Acquisitions Will Boom. Why? Because business sellers who don’t want to change have a great opportunity to exit right now since buyers can pay a good price and finance their purchases with very cheap loans. Of course, most firms will embrace the change, which includes a completely new style of leadership for a remotely connected workforce full of diverse team members. We completely revamped our Leadership structure and decision-making authority to bring more diversity into our strategic planning and decision making process, and to delegate more to get things done faster and with a keener eye to the future.
• The Talent Wars Are Just Getting Started. The number of people entering the workforce each year barely exceeds the number dropping out due to retirement, and this is likely to get worse over the next decade. Limiting your search for talent to people who can commute to your offices every day means you’ll have a much smaller talent pool than those who embrace a connected and flexible work environment. In our own firm, our most successful “connected” employees identified three key attributes for working in a remote environment. They are: 1. Office-like productivity wherever you work; 2. Customized communication by individual and group, and 3. Trust that needs to be both readily given and continually earned. Our own leaders in the kitchen and bath segment live and work in Green Bay, San Luis Obispo, Chicago, Tampa, Irvine and a treehouse (no joke) near Seattle. Business is booming and they report feeling very connected. Would it be better if they all worked physically together? Sure. Would we have the same level of talent? Not a chance.
• More Collaboration. Video chatting has made it much easier for people to connect. While in-person conferences like KBIS will be more important than ever for building new relationships and demonstrating new products, video calls make it easier to stay in touch and connected throughout the year. During COVID-19, our firm pivoted from hosting three in-person client events each year to two monthly webinars and a host of sessions on special topics. This has resulted in more peer talent being introduced to each other, as well as deeper relationships and shared learning that didn’t exist in the old environment. For instance, industrial designers are connecting directly with the architects and builders designing the homes that will be built two years from now. Knowledge is flowing more freely, and more collaboratively, than ever before.

If this isn’t exciting, I don’t know what is.

John Burns is founder and principal of John Burns Real Estate Consulting, a market research and consulting firm that collaborates with NKBA on various projects including the quarterly Kitchen & Bath Market Index (KBMI), a barometer of the industry’s current health, challenges and business expectations.