There is little doubt that the lockdown months have forced many of us to reassess our homes and how we live in them. As we head towards 2022 with a certain amount of relief, Trend-Monitor looks at the impact of Covid-19 on our behaviours and highlights how this has driven the Top Ten priorities we now have for our homes.
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No.10 Hybrid Homes
The lockdown restrictions, in conjunction with a number of developing social, demographic and economic trends, have emphasised the requirement for our homes to be able to adapt to a range of scenarios.
No.9 Ageless Homes
According to the Office for National Statistics, one third of UK households are multi-generational. This is set to increase, mainly due to a combination of elderly relatives increasing likely to live with their offspring rather than going into institutional care, and adult children living with parents longer due to rising house prices and rents or waiting longer to get married/start a family.
No.8 Pet Friendly Homes
Already key trend for homeowners prior to Covid and now further driven by the 3.2 million households in the UK which acquired a new pet since the start of the pandemic.
No.7 Office Space at Home
Prior to the pandemic in 2019, just 27% of the workforce on average during the year reported that they had done any work from home. By April 2020, figures released from the Office for National Statistics showed that the proportion of people in employment who had done some work at home had increased to 47% following the outbreak of COVID-19
No.6 Health Checks at Home
Monitoring and logging our personal data with the aim of using it to improve our health and well-being is otherwise known as self-quantification. This has been a growing trend since the advent of the smart home and is now being driven by our growing health anxieties.
No.5 Quiet Homes
Noise is very much an invisible pollutant as many layers of sound can build up over time. Whereas previously we may have been able to ignore these layers of sound, working from home, and in particular when on Zoom or in virtual meetings, has made us extra sensitive to the amount of noise we have going on around us in our homes.
No.4 Clean Air at Home
Concerns over the quality of the air circulating through our homes were rising prior to Covid, and the amount of time we spent at home during lockdown only served to reinforce these concerns.
No.3 Voice Activated Homes
Voice technology was already a strong growth trend prior to Covid, but has seriously accelerated as the pandemic has made many people very uncomfortable with touching buttons and screens.
No.2 Curated Homes
The huge choice of products we are now offered for our homes is both a positive and a negative for consumers.
In 2022, forward-thinking businesses will adopt a policy of using data to generate true insights about the products and services that really appeal to their target market, thereby making choosing products easier and more pleasurable for their customers.
No.1 Easily Sustainable Homes
Covid has raised awareness of the impact we as individuals are directly having on the future of the planet and sustainability was found to be a key consideration for consumers throughout 2021
These trends have been taken from the Trend-Monitor Post-Covid Trend Map for the UK Home Improvement Sector. This trend map puts consumer behaviours into context by starting at the top with global megatrends that have been gathering pace long before Covid. These filter down into a range of macro-trends that have since been impacted by Covid and will have a long term influence on our behaviours at a more local level; in our homes and on our high streets.
View the full trend map here https://trend-monitor.co.uk/post-covid-trend-map/