Top Construction Trends of 2023 & 2022

Some companies experiment with marketing their brands in hotels and airports; they’re a way to get exposure to customers who will then try the brand at home. Gush paint, which sells wall paint designed to absorb pollutants, is using a similar approach: they landed a large health system as a customer, and painted many of its delivery rooms with their paint. Since the paint is pricier than other kinds, this is the kind of detail the hospital is likely to highlight to new moms—some of whom may decide they'd rather not bring their newborn home to a less-than-healthy home environment.

That’s especially powerful product placement when marketing to new parents, who are often suddenly open to lifestyle changes and spending in new categories (in Gush Paint’s home country of Singapore, births are very likely to be to new parents—the country’s fertility rate is 1.14 children per woman). Other companies have built big businesses on marketing to customers at a key point in their lives: Gillette, for example, has marketed itself by sending free razors to people on their 18th birthdays, to get them to buy blades.

Increasingly, indoor air quality is important to consumers: while the pandemic certainly raised awareness around ventilation and air filtration, even in years beforehand there was a growing drumbeat of studies and news stories about how much indoor air quality affected people's lives. Gush Paint’s product is an interesting reversal, since lead paint was historically a major source of health problems—now, paint is being used to solve them instead.

Gush Paint has raised money from property developers and construction companies, which use its product as a selling point in new and remodeled homes. This gives the real estate sector a way to tap into growing interest in health and wellness.

Millions of rural landowners are land rich but cash poor. Any way to increase liquidity is attractive to this demographic who often inherited the land and many of whom are facing rising property taxes and stagnant earnings.

A growing number of these landowners are now finding a relatively straightforward solution as Barndomoniums take off in popularity. These metal barn-building kits let buyers build a stylish and affordable home in true IKEA fashion. And then, rather than go through the process of finding a broker and selling the property, home and all, many simply list the property on a marketplace like Airbnb.

The kits come with all the challenging parts already installed, such as plumbing and electrical. And by letting buyers customize the kit, they can also avoid a third challenging and costly aspect of building a home: hiring an architect.

Even those that don’t yet have land are taking part, amid the growth of articles with titles like “How to buy inexpensive land, build for cheap, and dominate Airbnb”.

Banrdominiums are not only much cheaper and easier than building a home from scratch, but they also sport less-obvious cost savings: Steel structures don't burn and they hold up better against tornadoes and earthquakes, leading to lower insurance rates.

And while steel companies and prefab companies capitalize on this trend, many smaller businesses are too: tens of thousands of consumers have bought guides and building plans on Amazon, created by small-time ecommerce sellers who are catching on early.

In parallel, the farming population is on the decline and rising crop yields mean that land is less important. Alternative ways to monetize land are consequently on the rise, whether through building and flipping homes, listing the homes on sites like Airbnb, or even renting out the land to campers on sites like HipCamp.