How Will a Hybrid Schedule Shape Real Estate and Home Life?*

Whether you’re a parent who has dealt with a variety of challenges to your ability to get work done this year, or a career-focused family where the pandemic brought huge chaos to your work life, it’s been a weird year for balancing work and life.

One way that companies are finding a new kind of balance for their employees is the idea of a hybrid schedule. After seeing many workers keep their productivity or experience gains from work-from-home, the companies are aiming for the best of both worlds. In many cases, this looks like a few days of in-office work when there are in-person meetings needed, and otherwise allowing individual contributions to be done from home.

So what can we anticipate in the real estate market and in the way our lives change as a hybrid schedule is being normalized? Clearly, parenting roles, work roles, and family relationships are going to continue to evolve, as they have so much in the past two years.

The Opportunity for Work and Life to Mesh

While most families experienced a little too much meshing of their work and their lives this year, there may be a way to see this as a positive thing with the advent of the hybrid schedule. It’s possible that families that used to rush here and there, trying to fit commutes, work, and home life into too few hours, will get some breathing room. Hybrid schedules often allow time of day flexibility too, meaning that parents that used to have real struggles to get children to and from school can make the drop-off and pick-up and just work a little earlier or later. In time, we may see things that were stop-gap solutions during the pandemic’s height, such as having children in the house during work hours, as part of some family’s ways of making a balanced life work.

The Need for Clear Distinctions in the Home

That being said, you can’t mesh life and work too much without having moments where neither parenting nor work tasks are going well. As a result, families are going to need to make clear distinctions in the physical layout of their homes to ensure that they have the work spaces they need to focus and the play spaces they need to really invest in their relationships. More than ever, doing work at the kitchen table with chaos around you is likely to go down, and home offices with closable doors will go up!

The Marketability of Homes With Office Potential Goes Up

As a result, if you’re trying to sell a house, you should consider what you’ll say if a buyer prospect asks about home office potential. Have a ready answer, whether it is a spare bedroom, a bonus room, or even a currently unfinished basement that has office potential. You’re likely to see more people who want both the comfort of a typical home and just a little extra space that can become their work “zone” for the long-term, since hybrid schedules are on the rise.