BY Melanie Robitaille, Sr. Staff Writer & Graphic Designer
For decades rhetoric has focused on the impact that the Baby Boomer generation would have on every social system imaginable, but very little focused on their real estate impact until recently. We’re living longer than ever before, which was the concern with the sheer size of the Boomers, who have since been encouraged by government incentives to age at home. But while managing their boom, we failed to notice that millennials outnumbered them by hundreds of thousands, causing not just a ripple effect, but a perfect housing storm.
A GROWING STATISTICAL CONCERN
The National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) 2024 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers shows some major record-breaking data to support the increasing gap between first-time homebuyers, a majority of whom are millennials, and repeat buyers, who primarily fall within the late Baby Boomer generation. If you look at the data from a 2019 Berkley Economic Review article, times were very different financially speaking when Boomers were coming up in the housing market. It was the zenith of the American Dream, which revolved around owning a home. The economy of the time was “robust and thriving” to the point where many were able to get into homeownership between the ages of 25 and 34 on a single income to boot. Compare that to NAR’s most recent median first-time buyer age of 38, and the lowest number of f irst-time buyers making up the market in NAR’s history of data collection since 1981, and it’s obvious that there’s a gap…and it’s growing fast.
HOPE FOR FIRST-TIME HOMEBUYERS
You can blame the Boomers or any number of factors like financialized landlords and investors, high interest rates, hard economic times, antiquated bylaws, or slow permitting processes, but up and comers like Associate Broker, Skyler Lemons of EXIT Strategy Realty in Chicago, IL are choosing to double down and focus in on this gap in order to help do something about it. Having obtained his license at the age of 24, Skyler followed the advice to work his sphere of influence, which just so happened to be millennial first-time homebuyers who all had the same chorus of concerns and doubts about the ability to own a home. “A lot of the people I would talk to about buying a house would come back and say, ‘Skyler you’re crazy, send me some apartments.’ So, I started talking to different lenders and I realized that all lenders have different guidelines so when it came to down payment assistance, historically, agents would just say, ‘It takes a long time,’ or whatever they needed to say as their excuse to not touch [first-time homebuyers]. My team and I started learning some of those different policies that the lenders have in place, learning who has the money with less red tape available, and learning who has the money without recapture periods and things of that nature,” he explained on a recent RISMedia webinar.
Find out how this 28 year old became known as the Down Payment Grant King on social media by reading the full story in the latest edition of The EXIT Achiever magazine today.
