Home-buying market is hot, except with millennials

Why, though, is a mystery

The home-buying market is hot right now in Wisconsin, except for one group.  

Millennials continue their trend of having the lowest home-ownership rate for their age group in history – the numbers first started getting measured a decade ago.

“They’re a tough group to figure out,” Marquette economist David Clark said, adding high levels of college debt may explain some of why millennials are putting off home buying.

“They also entered the kind of prime home-buying market at the worst time and that’s when we hit this meltdown,” Clark continued.

Now that the economy is healthy again, millennials who can buy, appear to be preferring to rent – part of why the nation’s home-ownership rate is at an all-time low – or that over-used cliche of living in mom and dad’s basement.

Clark thinks it could change, however. 

“When they start having children,” Clark theorized, “the drive to move toward better school districts may actually be that point where they start looking at owner-occupied housing instead of renter housing.”

The reasoning at this point, though, is simply a mystery.

“Whether or not the reason they’re sitting on the sidelines is because they have different preferences for urban living or for apartment living,” Clark said, “as opposed to home ownership, is something that we have to kind of wait and see.”

The demand for homes in states like Wisconsin has heated up to the point where properties are selling in days and prices are on the rise.