New Listing! Pretty in pink Malibu beach house. Unique open-air design. Totally toyetic aesthetic and features throughout. 3-story circular slide, pool, indoor elevator and garage for parking pink convertible (included!). Wheelchair accessible. Sturdy plastic construction. Dream of a deal. Won’t last long!
A REALTOR®‘s dream
Did you know a Barbie® Dreamhouse™ is sold every two minutes?
There’s nothing stereotypical about Stereotypical Barbie.
She’s done it all: Astronaut (four years before man walked on the moon). Surgeon. CEO. Presidential candidate and more than 200 other careers since she started as a teenage fashion model.
She has it all, too: The wardrobe (complete with accessories, gross sales of which in 20221 amounted to about $1.49 billion — that’s a ‘B’ as in Barbie — not including the $1B opening gross from this summer’s self-named blockbuster movie). Social influence (according to Mattel®, she has more brand awareness than the most popular influencers). Convertibles, boats, even a Barbie Dreamplane™.
And given her impressive portfolio of more than 20 Dreamhouses, you can now add real estate mogul to her list of accomplishments.
Little pink houses for you and me? Not Barbie. If it were a real house, her original Malibu Dreamhouse would have cost $77,537 in 1962 when it first hit toy stores. How much would that be in today’s dollars? According to a report last month on Barbie Dreamhouse prices from 1962 to 2023 by Corelogic, Barbie’s LA-based beachfront abode would have appreciated by a whopping 3,521% at an estimated price of $2,807,328.
Quite the return on investment – especially for a home with just three walls.
Real Estate Mogul Barbie
A trendsetting icon since she was first introduced to the world in 1959, Barbara Millicent Roberts, aka, Barbie, certainly seems to have as much business savvy as she does fashion sense. Barbie “purchased” her first home in 1962, a self-contained cardboard model that folded neatly into its own carrying case.
This original “tiny house” featured cardboard furniture including a bed, sofa, television, record player, bookshelves and closet space with plastic hangers. And no kitchen. (Read on to see why.)
Remodels and renovations
Since then, her Dreamhouse has come a long way. Over the years it’s been remodeled and renovated to reflect the architectural and interior design trends of the day. There have been over 20 different Barbie Dreamhouses, each with its own unique features and design.
Barbie and friends have taken up residence in popular home styles ranging from mid-century modern to Atomic Age A-frames to 1990s McMansions, even revitalized Victorians. Features have included garages, working elevators, lights that turn on and off and in 2008, a flushing pink toilet.
The Dreamhouse has not only been inspiring children to let their imaginations run wild for more than six decades but adults, too.
In conjunction with the release of “Barbie” last month, top celebrity designers competed to transform a real home into a Dreamhouse on HGTV’s Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge. (You can see the amazing toyetic transformation here.) And to celebrate Barbie’s 60th birthday in 2019, thousands worldwide toured real Dreamhouses in cities like Berlin and Miami. In honor of that milestone, an Airbnb Dreamhouse in Malibu was also listed for a limited time and again this summer when it got a little “Kenergy” for two nights as part of the marketing campaign for the new film.
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A bit of Barbie trivia: To bring Barbie’s world to life for the movie “Barbie,” four life-size Dreamhouses were built at studios in Britain, leading to a shortage of paint in her signature color Barbie Pink (PMS 219).
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Homeowner Barbie
But the original Material Girl and real estate mogul isn’t all about fun and games. She represents much more than a toy doll.
Barbie’s creator and Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler wanted Barbie to represent choice and possibility for girls. As a conduit for their own creativity and imagination, Barbie could help empower them to be anything they wanted to be … including homeowners, not just housekeepers. (Hence the significance of no kitchen in her first home.) Homeownership has long been the foundation of the American dream, and Barbie’s Dreamhouses continue to instill that in children from a young age.
The fact that Barbie was a successful, single working woman (remember her early fashion model days) and a homeowner in 1962 was practically unheard of then. It was long before women in the United States were allowed to open their own bank accounts or apply for their own credit. At the time only 0.1% of young women were independent homeowners.
Girl, have times changed!
Single women now own and occupy more homes than single men in the United States. That’s according to a new report by LendingTree. The study analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau 2021 American Community Survey and found that 10.76 million homes were owned and occupied by single women, while 8.12 million were owned and occupied by single men.
That’s pretty significant progress considering it wasn’t until 1974 that women were legally protected to obtain a mortgage without a co-signer. (Ken, BTW, was never on the deed of any of Barbie’s homes.) According to the National Association of REALTORS (NAR), prior to the 1968 passage of the Fair Housing Act’s prohibitions against sex discrimination in housing-related transactions, and the protections of the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, it was common for a widow to need a male relative as a co-signer. Women had no legal recourse under federal law for this or any other kind of lending discrimination.
Since the NAR started collecting data on the topic in 1981, women have been second only to married couples in the home buying market. That year, 73% of home buyers were married couples, 11% were single women and 10% were single men. As of 2021, those shares stood at 60% married couples, 19% single women and 9% single men.2
Think pink and save
Today, though, buying and owning a home, especially one with a three-story slide, can feel as impractical as one of Barbie’s Dreamhouses. (None of which have any natural elements like running water, BTW. Lights, doorbells, fireplace? All battery powered.)
From July 2021 to June 2022, the median home price exceeded $400,000 for the first time. The share of first-time homeowners – women and men – plummeted to the lowest it’s been since at least 1981.3 In fact, even Barbie couldn’t afford her own Dreamhouse on the salaries of most of the jobs she’s had.
But the days of the staggering 20.42% appreciation Barbie’s seen on her Malibu home in just the last three years are slowly – and hopefully – coming to an end. Recent Realtor.com research predicts the housing market will return to pre-pandemic norms by late next year. (Who knows? Maybe even before we see a “Barbie” sequel. )
Ready to buy – or sell – your own dream house? Offerpad can help make living in a Barbie world a reality in more than 1,700 cities and towns across the country. Get a free, no-obligation cash offer that could put you in the pink and on your way to the home of your dreams. Check out how we can help you literally save thousands when you sell, buy and get a home loan with us.
1 https://www.statista.com/statistics/370361/gross-sales-of-mattel-s-barbie-brand/
