Browse Model Homes Without Kids in Tow

By Katherine Salant

With two kids and a third on the way, you've finally gained the momentum to move forward on the new house you've been talking about for five years. You'll certainly spend time debating features, location and price range. You also need to work out the logistics of how you're going to look at models. It's only natural to bring everyone along, but making the best decisions for the household requires that parents be very focused, and this will be hard with kids in tow.

If you can leave the kids at home under a baby sitter's watchful eye, you'll be more efficient, and you'll cover more territory. With young children, trying to see more than two models in an afternoon is pushing it; if the kids are home, you can see as many as five.

If you can't get a sitter, move on to Plan B-the kids come with you, and plan accordingly. During the spring and fall when buyer traffic is heaviest, Columbia, Md., home builder Allan Waschak has an extra person on weekends to look after small children while their parents look at his model. But, he said, the service is only extended to the parents while they look at his model, not while they look at three other models in the same model home park, which occasionally happens on busy days when his sales agents don't realize the parents have left.

In addition to the weekend hostess who will watch small kids for a short while, Washak has a home theatre in the basement of his model where he routinely screens children's movies. It's proved to be a great diversion for older children, but toddlers and very young children are not comfortable being left alone in it, and they often don't want to sit with his agents either, Waschak said.

Waschak said his home theater has also proved to be a boon to parents with teenagers, who are always reluctant to move away from their friends. "After 45 minutes of hearing their kids moan nonstop about the proposed move, the parents heave a sigh of relief when our sales agents tell them, 'we've got XYZ movie your kids can watch,'" he said. If the teens don't want to watch a movie, they're often amenable to watching football or some other sporting event on the television in his model's family room, Waschak added.

While Waschak is prepared for buyers with children, most builders are not. Pulte Homes, the largest home-building firm in the country, leaves the decision to provide accommodations for children to the discretion of each division president and project manager. Brookfield Homes, another large national builder, likewise leaves this up to the heads of divisions and project mangers.

Brookfield Homes' San Diego-Riverside, Calif., division, is one that does have an organized program for kids. When a project is marketed for young families, the firm provides both interior and exterior diversions for children, division president Steve Doyle said. Brookfield builds a small playground with a swing set next to the models and a children's playroom within the model's sales area. The wall between the playroom and the adjacent sales office has a large window so that the sales agent can keep an eye on things. In addition, Doyle's division usually has two agents at each model on the weekends, so there is usually someone available to watch children for brief periods.

For those projects that are not marketed to young families, Brookfield has at least one operating television in the model that runs children's videos, Doyle said. The room with the television is always next to the sales agent's office, and a large glass window is temporarily installed in the wall between the rooms so that the agent can keep an eye on things here as well.

When there's no playroom or extra person at the model to keep an eye on your kids, which is likely to be the case in most places, and your children are too young to park in a home theater or the model doesn't have one, you'll have to bring them with you on your model tour. This can be trying because the models are decorated to be engaging, but they're not intended to be road tested, as in trying out all the chairs or playing with the toys in the children's bedrooms. You can't even leave your kids in one bedroom while you look at the one across the hall because left unattended, many children start rough housing and they can injure themselves. Waschak said that so far he has never had a serious injury occur when children were unsupervised, but there's always the "occasional 3-1/2-year-old who shuts a closet door on the 2-1/2-year-old's finger."

If you're bringing the kids along, you also need to plan your model tours for the time of day when your children are wide awake. It's tempting to sandwich a model tour or two between other weekend errands. But visiting a model on the spur of the moment-as you did when you looked for your first house and had no children-will be a disaster if it's the third stop of the afternoon and your kids are tired, fidgety and ready for a nap. When you're walking around an unfamiliar house you may not be able to calm them, and if they're crying, you can't hear anything the sales agent is saying.

After you've finally settled on a builder, a floor plan and options and are ready to negotiate a sales contract and select options, finishes and cabinets, planning ahead for your children's needs is even more important. This will be a long meeting, and buyers often end up having several long meetings. This is commonly the case in California because the state has so many disclosure laws, Doyle said.

For the longer meetings, the sales office playroom that the kids liked when the parents were only in the model for a short time is not useful because you can't count on your children playing quietly in it, Doyle said. His firm urges parents to engage a babysitter and leave the kids at home. So does Sarasota, Fla., home builder Lee Wetherington. His firm tried the playroom concept in several models, but discontinued it because the children, uncomfortable in a strange place, frequently became restless and disruptive during the long meetings. The mother or the father had to check on their children constantly, and nearly every decision made while one parent was out of the room had to be revisited. Not surprisingly, Wetherington said, "the meetings took forever." In one instance, the parents later paid for costly change orders because they regretted the decisions they made under such trying circumstances.

As the house goes up, most buyers want to visit the job site frequently and bring the whole family along, not realizing that construction sites can be dangerous, especially for children. There will be unsecured window openings before the windows are installed, holes in the floor for heating and air conditioning ducts, stairwells with safety rails to protect workmen, not children from falling through the rails, and stud walls through which a child could easily fall two stories to the ground below. If you bring your kids, you will defeat the purpose of visiting your house while it's under construction because you'll spend all your time chasing after your kids and you won't see anything, Waschak said.

Doyle said his firm allowed parents to bring the kids along for site visits, but their rule is that children under 12 must be taken by the hand at all times.