Design Basics, LLC, the designer and marketer of single- and multi-family home plans, has introduced Livability At A Glance®, an alternative way for future homeowners to discover the floor plans that meet their needs on a more substantial level. Traditional searches of house plans were based on the number of rooms, square footage, and other physical features, while this new system is based on indicators that make a home more “livable.”
This new search feature was created after the discovery that many women look at floor plans differently. An ongoing series of consumer focus groups determined that some women were more interested in “how the home lives” over many traditional criteria. The company then focused on four elements that these women were using to evaluate home designs.
The new criteria include how the home entertains, how it can help relieve stress, whether or not there is flexibility in the design, and if there is sufficient storage space. Design Basics is using these aspects to help consumers filter through their available plans to find the one that meets specific needs.
The Livability At A Glance® floor plans are color coded to highlight the different elements of a home. Potential buyers can search through listings by the relative importance of each. Customers simply indicate how important each of the four criteria is, and they will get results that are based on more than just the square footage of small house plans.
Design Basics has also added a Livability Index that allows customers to compare plans by looking at a composite rating based on the four criteria. All of these options were designed to complement the traditional search process but provide alternatives for discovering the most relevant plans.
About Design Basics, LLC
As a leader in the stock home plan industry, Design Basics, LLC designs and markets plans for single-family homes through catalogs, newsstand magazines and home building industry publications. Our company began in 1983 as a custom home plan design firm for the professional builders of our local community - Omaha, Nebraska. As the popularity of our designs increased, we expanded our focus from designing for the local market only, to designing plans that would be adaptable anywhere. Since then, home builder and consumer interest in our plans has grown tremendously in all 50 states and countries around the world.