Millennials and homes – hurry up and flip
Posted On April 30, 2015
They’re upwardly mobile. They’re rootless. Sentimentality is not their thing. They’re attuned to current trends. And they have different goals and dreams than their parents.
So it should be no surprise that Millennials often have different goals than previous generations when they go to buy a house — and it behooves the real estate market to recognize that.
Citing the results of recent reports from the National Board of Realtors and the TD Bank Mortgage Service Index, Forbes Magazine notes that Millennials are the largest group of home-buyers in the country – 32 percent of the market – and more than half of them expect to purchase homes within the next year.
Except many of them won’t likely be calling them home for long. While Baby Boomers and many Gen-Xers search for their “forever home,” Millennials often think more pragmatically about their real estate purchases.
Some characteristics:
- They’re buying earlier. In no hurry to adhere to the Baby Boomer ideal of settling down and starting a family, many Millennials are buying homes before they get married.
- They’re selling more quickly. Instead of looking for a home in which they will put down roots and plant themselves, Millennials are often looking for investment opportunities when they hit the real estate market. Unfortunately, this often pits them against cash-flush investors in the market.
- Many of them have significant student-loan debt. This means they have to get creative and take advantage of special offers to come up with a down payment.
Call them the Sign and Flip generation. And with the number of house-flipping shows on their televisions turning rundown fixer-uppers into a move-in-ready piles of cash 30 minutes at a time, who can blame them?
If only it were that easy. While Millennials look to jump feet-first into the real estate market, they shouldn’t forget about saving for the future as well. But what made sense for the Baby Boomer and Generation X home-buyers doesn’t necessarily make sense for Millennials. In terms of finding a place to settle down, “forever” can wait a few more years.