I like modern architecture-I hate Colonial, Victorian (hate it with a passion!), and other “traditional” styles. Where I live (New England) people LIKE the old stuff-they go gaga over 4-color Victorain houses-which cost a heap to maintain. I’ve laways wanted a contemporary home-but realtors have advised against them-they say they are very hard to re-sell! Also, because of the prevailing culture (past-worshipping), contemporary houses are quite rare here. Are these guys right? If i were to build a modern house, would i take a bath on it? or should i move to some place where contemporary houses are more common 9far West, Florida)?
I’m not a Realtor, nor have I stayed in a Holiday Inn recently, but it suspect that you’ve been advised correctly. Modern architecture (and modern design in general) tends to be fairly plain. There are many, many, many people who think contemporary houses are boring and uninspired. A sizeable fraction of said people (including my dad) think modern architecture is downright ugly, and wouldn’t take such a house if you gave it to them.
Location location location.
Any house is a bad investment if it doesn’t match the neighborhood. A one story home in a two story neighborhood will sell poorly, and vice versa. So if someone has a Bauhaus squarish building with corner windows, and it is among Victorians, it will be a hard sell.
If there are rows of them, like in sections of LA and Miami, etc. they will be sought out by people who like them, and the price is high.
IAMAR either, but our exeriences may halp. Many years ago we bought an architect-designed contemporary home in Vermont for a real bargain. It had been on the market a long time, as most city people coming there wanted a colonial or a Victorian. I even haggled them down quite a bit. It was a wonderful house and we loved it.
When we had to sell it to move to another state, I did not even list it with a broker, as knew there were only a small percentage of potential buyers who would be interested. Instead, I placed a small ad in the Rural Real Estate For Sale of The New York Times for about $400.
We got 44 inquiries from all over the country. Nine people came to look, and we sold it to a guy from Venzuela. He just wrote me a check on a Swiss bank. Obviously, he was in the oil business.
Some years later did likewise with another contemporary in upstate NY.
The thing you have to bear in mind is that there are people out there who will buy, but they are a tiny minority, so you have to expect to wait a while to hook one. If you feel you will be in a position where it is necessary to make a quick sale, then shy away from modern design.
The exception may be California where there are not only a lot of wonderful modern-design homes, but a large population with more people who are interested in that type of home.
I’ve noticed that a lot of so-called “modernistic” houses have flat roofs. A real estate agent once told me that a house with a flat roof is very hard to sell because the roofs are very high-maintenance and tend to leak. A house like that in my mom’s neighborhood has been vacant and on the market for years (when I was a kid, we all referred to it as “the Jetsons house”).
Incidentally, the dirty little secret of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings is that they tend to have very leaky roofs. I took a tour of one Wright building that had buckets all over the place and water stains on the walls.
The house I described in Vermont had a flat roof, and I heard the same thing all the time. I had less trouble (actually, no trouble) with that roof, despite tons of snow, than any other house we had. If it is properly constructed, has good flashing around the chimney, it is great.
No “snow dams” built up arond the edges as with pitched roofs, good drains built in and drain pipes inside the walls and out, so no gutters needed with the problems of keeping them cleaned out, etc.
When people asked me if I had trouble, I pointed out that the area was full of motels, schools, office buildings, garages and so forth all with flat roofs. Then they said, “Oh, yeah.” 
The weight of the snow was never a problem? Even on sloped roofs, folks tend to rake off significant snow depths.
I could see you would have a problem up here. Flatlanders who are buying a vacation home up here would probably want the country look, in contrast the more modern home they might have in the city.
In St. Louis, at least they’re supposedly hard to sell
So hard, in fact, it took two parts to tell the whole story.
You got lucky. The place where I work is a flat-roofed building, and we’re constantly fighting leaks. There has been at least one leak per year in the six years I’ve worked there. I’ve also noticed water stains in the ceiling tiles of my credit union, among many other flat-roofed locations. The flat roof’s reputation for leaking is well-deserved, believe me.
Incidentally, I’ve been told by roofers (at my place of employment) that the reason you see flat roofs on most commercial buildings is because they’re cheaper to install than pitched roofs.
I think one problem with modern architecture is that it tends to look dated in about 10 years. So a modern house built in the 1990s does not have the same sort of modern design that would meet today’s aesthetics, but also doesn’t look classic, like a craftsman style home or whatever.
Just more anecdotal evidence, and obviously much depends on prevailing local conditions, but yeah, the real estate professionals I’ve worked with in the Atlanta area generally say that contemporaries are harder to move than traditionals, all things being equal. I don’t think that’s true as much for older modern-style homes in older in-town neighborhoods as it is for the 15-30 year old contemporaries in suburban areas, where most of the houses are more traditional. A lot of the contemporaries in areas like that tend to be the sort of angular, inept-melange-of-boxy-shapes-style houses that really are pretty unappealing in general. What’s ironic is that in many cases the interior floor plans of these houses aren’t much different from the traditional houses around them – they just look different from the outside. The flat roof thing isn’t much of an issue with these, since most have pitched roofs.
A lot of the time it’s because modern homes (espcially the McHouses) have teeny-tiny rooms with low ceilings (except, of course, for the currently-popular grand atrium in the foyer which looks nice but is an acoustical, space-wasting nightmare.) They’s why, when I started house shopping, I wanted to find an older home. I ended up buying a 1930s Colonial Revival which has nice, spacious rooms, lovely woodwork and all of the little quirks and charms which come from an old home. (It also comes with drafty windows and plaster walls which crack constantly, but you take the good with the bad.)
A well-built modern-design home will, of course, get that “dated” look after the trend dies, but I prefer to call it “pre-classic.” In eighty more years, the house will be considered charming and in a hundred more, it will be considered a treasure and will probably undergo a painstaking rennovation to look as it did in 2000. (I doubt if many of the McHouses in those packed suburban neighborhoods will survive long enough to capture this designation.)