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Housing Supply Challenge: 2024 Homeowner Perspectives on Housing Innovations

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Nov 19, 2024

Executive Summary

This report offers insights into the attitudes and preferences of Canadian homeowners, empowering stakeholders to refine their strategies in line with market needs. Through qualitative research, we explore key homeowner behaviors, barriers to adoption, and opportunities for engagement with innovative housing solutions. We aim to inform developers, builders, and policymakers with practical recommendations to help them better align their offerings with consumer demand.

Drawing on qualitative ecosystem research designed to gather insights from 56 Canadian homeowners across diverse demographics, we examined homeowner perspectives on innovative housing, focusing on their awareness, perceptions, and barriers to adoption. The different forms of housing innovation we investigated include Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), middle housing and multiplex conversions, modular and prefabricated housing, affordable housing, supportive housing, non-profit housing associations, and community bonds. By exploring these topics, we identified common themes that set the foundation for quantitative research to validate and expand upon the preliminary findings in this report. The results of our quantitative study will be shared on this website through a different content piece.  

Throughout the research, we observed that many participants used "modular" and "prefabricated" interchangeably, reflecting a lack of clear differentiation between these methods. As a result, we collapsed the findings for modular and prefabricated housing innovations in this report to provide a unified analysis.

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