Move over weddings, housewarming gift registries are here

**Housewarming parties are the new in-thing.**

Imagine this: A friend just moved into a new house and has invited you for a housewarming party. What do you do? For many, turning up with a bottle of wine would be enough. And then somebody thought: Gift registries. Weddings have them, and now so do housewarming parties, at Ikea.

Realtor.com reports that the ready-to-assemble furniture king launched a registry for weddings, baby showers, and, you guessed it, housewarming. “Ikea is hardly the only store offering a housewarming registry. It’s actually late to the game, beaten by stores like Target, Wayfair, and Crate & Barrel, which have long urged new homeowners to pressure hapless friends to fund their furnishing spree,” reads the report. Not all are enthralled by the idea though. “If someone wants to bring you a gift, they don’t need to be coaxed,” Diane Gottsman, founder of the Protocol School of Texas and author of “Modern Etiquette for a Better Life” is quoted as saying, adding that housewarming registries have taken off because we are more and more comfortable with crowdfunding for everything imaginable.

People are less hesitant to ask, especially when it’s not face-to-face and modern technology makes it so easy.

And then there are those that love the idea as this quote from realtor.com shows: “’Housewarming registries are not tacky if someone just purchased their first house and is throwing a housewarming party,’ says Courtney Lutkus at Simply Radiant Events. Where the idea of a housewarming registry starts to get tacky is if someone moves often, is moving into a rental, or is moving and purchasing a house to upgrade from their last house. This trend is likely to be on the rise because fewer and fewer people are getting help for down payments plus home prices have skyrocketed.’”

So, the next time someone invites you for a housewarming party and reminds you the registry is at one shop or the other, don’t act surprised.