Two new apartment complexes, catering explicitly to young professionals looking to have fun in the city, are going up in West Hollywood. These mixed use properties boast myriad amenities, many of which encourage social interaction among residents, such as:
- bartending and flower arranging classes;
- rooftop pool decks;
- clubhouses; and
- restaurants and shops at the ground levels.
The buildings are named The Dylan and The Huxley, after two intellectual greats of modern literature, Dylan Thomas and Aldous Huxley.
first tuesday insight
When luxury apartment buildings begin to be named after avant garde literary figures, you know the times are a changin’. We’ve been writing about this paradigm shift from outliers to city folks in California real estate for several years now — and it’s really gaining steam.
The next generation of real estate buyers has vastly different ideas about what makes a property desirable. Mixed-use neighborhoods, featuring a blend of convenience and cultural cache, are the new ideal. Walk, maybe run, but dare not waste time in a car. Live where you work; work where you live.
It is a brave new world indeed! The paths of progress always shift after a recession, more so coming out of a financial crisis.
Agent advice
Beware of reducing the demographic to a cliché. Yes, the Facebook generation values technology and social networking, but they are also increasingly better informed and generally suspicious of those in the real estate industry.
To successfully interface with the clients of tomorrow means upping your game and honing your expertise now. Oh, and you ought to be able to talk intensely about something more than real estate sales.
Related articles:
Re: Apartments aimed at creative tenants going up in West Hollywood from the Los Angeles Times
Not to split hairs, because I don’t disagree the article’s argument about the existence of these trends and the need for agents to be flexible and adapt to them – but I’m going to split hairs. Specifically, cheeky prose about “the times a-changin’!” with regard to urban living is a discredit to your otherwise high-caliber writing and research. There is nothing new about the benefits of urban density and access to amenities in an urban setting. In fact, it’s as old as humanity’s practice of building cities and has never really ended, even through the United States’ eras of the prewar streetcar and railroad suburb and postwar explosion of automobile suburbs. There is far, far more to life than the SFR, despite the pervasive (and largely fallacious) frontier mythology of American individualism that has so strongly influenced North American practices of dwelling and, for all intents and purposes, birthed this industry in its modern iteration.