Fun Facts from the Zillow Consumer Housing Trends 2017 Report
Posted on October 19, 2017 by Laura Lucky
The annual Consumer Housing Trends Report from Zillow compiles data for the real estate market across the U.S. as a whole. Here are some tidbits we found in the report that we thought were interesting:
Homeowners
• Thirty-nine percent of Baby Boomer and 25 percent of Silent Generation homeowners still live in the first home they bought. There are likely several million homes that will hit the market over the next two decades for the first time since the 1950s or 1960s. What state will they be in? This is potentially a pool of “affordable” entry-level homes.
• Fourteen percent of U.S. homeowners say their home needs serious updating; 61 percent say their home could use “a little updating.” This speaks to the enormous potential demand in the American economy for home improvement labor and materials, and to an often-overlooked cost (both financial and emotional) of homeownership.
Buyers
• Nearly a third (29 percent) of buyers go over budget. More than a third of Millennial buyers (37 percent) go over budget, compared with 27 percent of Generation X buyers, 19 percent of Baby Boomers and 25 percent of the Silent Generation. Perhaps due to their inexperience, first-time buyers (many of them Millennials) are more likely to exceed their budget (32 percent) than repeat buyers (27 percent). Blowing the budget could also be tied to the fact that more than half of homes available to buy are valued in the top one-third of all homes. More than 40 percent of home buyers are first-time buyers, compounding the intense competition for less expensive homes.
Sellers
• Millennials make up almost one-third (32 percent) of sellers. For all the talk about Millennials having trouble saving down payments and getting into their first homes, a fair share of them have both done that and are turning around to sell.
• One in two sellers (50 percent) sells their home below its list price. Millennial (30 percent) and Generation X sellers (24 percent) are more likely to sell their homes above list price than older generations (11 percent of Baby Boomer and 19 percent of Silent Generation sellers). This trend is attributable in part to location: Younger sellers are more likely to be selling a home in an urban area, where homes sell above their listing prices 29 percent of the time (compared with 20 percent in the suburbs and 13 percent in rural areas).
