The Architecture of American McMansions Is Not Conducive To Large Format Home Theaters
By Jerry Del Colliano
At the end of February 2008, I sold my first three online AV publications to a publically traded company which was without question - the deal of my life so far. My media broker warned me not to expect Berkshire Hathaway type autonomy from the big company and he was completely right. They made it clear that they could live without me, the editorial staff and all but one of the technical staff. Today they are trying to learn how to live without the advertisers but that's a different story altogether as I ended up creating HomeTheaterReview.com and buying HDTVetc.com to compete. And no - they didn't sign me to a non-compete. Everybody asks that question and rightfully so.
In the early months after I sold the company and well before the banking collapse in September of 2008 that really ignited the painfully bad economy we are still suffering with today - I looked at a number of different business opportunities that had nothing to do with online publishing. One of them was a business deal that would have "given me" a good ol' brick and mortar home theater store. Despite the fall of specialty AV dealers around the country, I was compelled to study the deal more. The current owner wasn't making money but he owned the building outright. Nearing retirement age, he was looking for somebody to be more of his tenant for the building than to keep running the store himself. Amazingly, the store and its TV repair shop have been around since the 1950's. The company boomed with profit with HDTVs in the mid-2000's, when the housing market was on fire and HDTVs had even a modicum of profit. Today, Costco will sell you a no-name or brand name HDTV at prices that left basically no retail margin. Historically, I loved my time in AV retail at Bryan Mawr Stereo and Sassafras back in Philadelphia in the early 1990's. My time spent working at Christopher Hansen Ltd. in Beverly Hills and Cello Music and Film Los Angeles after moving to California from Philly was even more fun and much more lucrative even as I was a music school student. Selling stereos and home theater was always about good times for me and it was something that I knew I was good at. This was an opportunity that I was going to need to carefully study.
A few weeks after being approached with the opportunity, I arranged for my wife and myself to go down to San Diego and see the showroom. To be polite, it was a nightmare. Somebody clearly spent money on the construction but the inventory was nothing short of a joke. They sold low-margin HDTVs with no Blu-ray players. They had no good speakers, HDMI receivers or cables. I could fix the issues but it would take money, time and effort. I was still wooed by the idea of the money in nearly by Rancho Sante Fe. These somewhat conservative people needed to see their LPGA events and Ann Coulter interviews in HD, didn't they?
The next day my wife and I headed out to look at houses in the area. A top real estate agent in Malibu called down to an absolutely fantastic agent who works in the Rancho Sante Fe area named Danielle Short. I am not generally a big fan of real estate agents but Danielle spent the time educating my wife and me to the many details of the nation's highest income zip code - Rancho Sante Fe. She was nothing short of fantastic. In one day we looked at 15 total homes ranging in price from $1,700,000 to $4,000,000. Some in the Covenant section of the neighborhood were really big and very nicely done. Others in the Bridges at Rancho Sante Fe (a major, master planned, high end community complete with a killer country club) were even slicker. The Bridges were loaded with $3,000,000 "McMansions" with really well done landscaping, incredible kitchens, and outdoor areas like I've never seen before and beyond. Don't get me started about the high tension wires in the backyard of some of the homes for sale, but I digress. Something started to bother me the more homes that I saw and it took me an hour or two to figure it out. The problem was that in each and every home we saw - there was no room for a home theater system. The focal point of a great room or living room was the fireplace and mantle. While there might be a library or sitting room - the best you could hope for was a 50 inch plasma. In 15 homes, I saw not a single home that had a reasonable media room and two of them boasted "dedicated media rooms".
Think about how much time the average family watches television and you would expect today's homes to understand the need and importance for well positioned, relatively large HDTV, but over and over the spot for a big HDTV was towards the ceiling positioned above a grand fireplace and mantle. The cost of a mount to lower even a modest HDTV from that position to a reasonable viewing angle would cost two to three times the price of even the best HDTVs.
In other parts of the country, architecture is different, especially when you can "finish" a basement into a home theater, but in California as well as many other parts of the country basements are pretty rare. Perhaps it's time for CEDIA or the CEA to start lobbying home builders (assuming anybody is still building homes in this real estate market) to include options for media rooms. The price of a large screen and a bright projector are lower than ever. Look at Epson's home theater in a box for $7,000 or $8,000 as a perfect example. Stereotypically, women absolutely love watching movies and HDTV in front of a huge screen. Men love watching movies and sports on the big screen. The entire family likes playing Wii in a bigger-than-life format. Even more compellingly, customers of new homes today can bury the cost of a modest to mid-level home theater into the mortgage. Much like a Sub-Zero fridge in the kitchen is an "installed" appliance in the home - so is a home theater. The issue is - you simply need to find room to install the system.
Whether it is retrofitting a bedroom or another room in the house and irregardless of whether the home prices are astronomical like they are in North County San Diego - people want large format home theater systems. Builders looking to move properties should consider adding a home theater along with solar panels to differentiate one home from the others currently up for sale. The money invested might just get the property off the market and into escrow. Big McMansion builders like Toll Brothers should seriously consider the idea of offering home layouts with dedicated, light controlled media rooms as well. It's how we live today, and home theaters are a luxury that Middle America can now afford in a market where the consumer is absolutely king.
