A new study has revealed surprising new numbers about Millennials and the generation’s purchasing power in the U.S. housing market.
Realtors that News 5 spoke with in Northeast Ohio agreed with the study from Harvard that said in 2015, for the first time, the housing market saw a big boom in buyers 25 to 35 years old.
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Millennials, thought to be the renter generation, according to the 2017 State of the Nation’s Housing report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, 1.4 million recent homebuyers were under age 35 in 2015.
“We’ve rented for so long we feel just that after a while we’re just losing the value of our money into something we’re never going to get back,” said 32-year-old doctor, Mena Boules.
Boules is one of thousands of American millennials looking to buy a home.
“I think it’s a common trend nowadays. Most of our friends and colleagues whether at work or outside of work, have kind of really stepped up to this trend that’s going on,” he said.
Cleveland realtor MaryBeth Declark is seeing the trend of millennial buyers take off in Northeast Ohio where more than 20 percent of her clients are under 35.
“For the areas we represent here on Cleveland’s west side, we’re finding that their budget is somewhere between $250-400,000 which is a little bit higher of a number than we would normally expect,” said Declare.
Declark attributes that to millennials finally making enough money, Cleveland’s low cost of living and like Boules, getting tired of spending money on rentals.
“They feel it’s important to have something that’s yours, be comfortable in it and kind of shift away from the renting,” said Boules.
The study found in lower population states, Ohio included, there was a higher percentage of millennial buyers, 30-35%. But in expensive, high population states like New York and California, millennials were still majority renters, with only about 15% millennial home buyers.
