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hi! this is jonathan sweet with housingzone.comand professional remodeler. i am here today with david barista, editor-in-chief of professionalbuilder. i understand you guys did some research forsome of your builder readers on trends that you have seen in sidings and other exteriorproducts. can you tell us a little bit about it?yes! each month we do exclusive research for professional builder readers. in the june’sissue we looked at exterior materials, finishes and products that are being specified fortheir new homes. i just have a few trends that i would like to go over now.one is that what are the top materials being used in new homes today. fiber cement is numberone by far. in fact only 10-12% of survey

base said that they didn’t use fiber cement.so 88-90% did use that. almost 40% use at older homes, so it’s quite surprising.other top materials are sort of stand-by like bricks, stone, wood, concrete blocks and thatsort of things. another interesting trend is the veneer products.we hear so much about veneer, stone veneer and the brick veneer. actually stone veneercame in second as far as builders that don’t use it. about 86% said that they do use itand about 14% said that they don’t use stone veneer. so it’s quite interesting to seethe veneer products grow throughout the year. that’s very interesting. one thing thatbuilders are trying to do in this market is set themselves apart from the competition.did you see anything that builders are doing

in exterior designs to try to be different?yes! obviously kitchen is the number 1 upgrade area of the home, but certainly the exterioris probably number 2. so we looked at what features are you selling as upgrades on theexteriors. no surprise that windows are by far number one, going for energy efficiencyand other aspects in mind. siding material is number 2, so you set the brick veneer,the stone, the upgraded siding, that sort of material.elevation and design changes, obviously people looking for that curve appeal – that cameat number 3. i think that the biggest surprise is number 4 – the entry doors. so people/buyers are really putting money into the doors that they see as true design feature of thehome. so i thought that it was quite interesting.

there are tons of results from this survey.again we will post them on housingzone.com later this week.

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