Today’s Real Estate Buyers
Today’s buyers are young, multicultural, tech-savvy, and eager to buy a home as a personal investment, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Here are a few key themes that emerged from NAR’s annual survey of recent home buyers.
- Buyers prefer their own agents. The internet hasn’t replaced real estate professionals. Eighty-nine percent of buyers say they hired their own agent to purchase a home.
- Ages and unmarried buyers are on the rise. Young adults ages 25 to 34 make up a quarter of all home buyers, the largest share. Meanwhile, first-time buyers are getting older: The median age rose to 33—the highest on record per the NAR. The median age of first-time buyers in 1981 was 29. While most people who buy together still wait for marriage, unmarried buyers make up a growing share of the market, 9% compared with 8% a year ago. Married buyers made up 61% of the market. That’s down from 73% in 1981. Single female buyers made up 17% of the market, while the share of single male buyers was 9%.
- Saving for a down payment. More than a quarter of buyers—28%—say they delayed their home purchase because of debt. The median amount of time homeowners spent saving for a down payment was four years, according to NAR’s survey. Many buyers cited saving for a down payment as the most difficult step in the homebuying process, indicating that student loans, credit card debt, and car loans diminished their purchasing power. The median down payment on a home purchase is 12% for all buyers. Broken out, the median down payment is 6% for first-time buyers and 16% for repeat buyers, according the report.
Todd Probasco is the Vice President of Mortgage Lending at Lakeside Bank. He can be reached at 708.205.2983 or t.probasco@lakesidebank.com Today.
