Millennial home buyers have brought a lot of changes to the world over the past few years, and they have created a great deal of change in the housing market as well. Millennials are a buying breed all their own, and if you are a millennial on the market for a new home, you are likely looking for drastically different house features than your parents.
Millennials are those between the ages of 25 and 34, and they are primed and ready to begin purchasing their first homes now that they are largely back to work and better employed than they were just a few years ago.
Millennials have learned a lot of tough lessons from the past few decades of seeing the financial troubles of their parents and friends, watching the financial collapse of 2008, and leaving college with tremendous amounts of debt.
With newly released statistics altering millennials that they will need to save for more than 10 years before they could afford a home, millennials are wising up to buying opportunities and skipping some traditional steps in the home investment process.
Today’s first-time homebuyers are swapping old home buying standards for shrewd buying choices, and this had led to many millennials skipping the step of buying a starter home first. A whopping 75% of millennials are taking the plunge into real estate by skipping the starter home, according to a 2016 Bank of America’s Homebuyer Insights Report.
Not only are millennials turning down smaller starter homes, which typically last buyers around five years, but they are investing in larger, family-friendly homes and smaller community-based home environments like condominiums in which they can begin raising their families through elementary school.
When the biggest hindrance to buying a home is saving up enough money for a down payment while simultaneously building good credit, it is making more fiscal sense for millennials to spend that hard-earned money on a long-term investment like a larger home or an easily sellable condominium.
Larger homes allow couples the freedom to expand their families without worrying about running out of room too quickly. Millennials are far less interested in purchasing homes that require fixing, so waiting to find that exact right home that supports their plans now instead of later is also a part of the plan. And they are willing to work extremely hard and sacrifice a lot of vacations and other luxuries in order to make that first home purchase.
Though a condominium may not seem like the ideal situation for doing the same, the setup of a building is remarkably more communal than a suburb could be, and allow millennial families to work together to create spaces within the building that suit the needs of everyone who lives there, like rooftop gardens, in-building gyms, and courtyards that are child friendly.
After paying back high student loan debts, working nights and weekends to save every penny, and staying put in their parents’ homes for years longer than Gen Y buyers, millennials are not willing to waste their money on a home that is too small, too old, or too limiting down the line. For them, even if it takes a few years longer to achieve their first home buying goals, it’s all worth it in the end if they can get their money’s worth.
