Real Estate Trend Shows Generation X and Y Making a Difference

It is important to note that the impact of both Gen X and Gen Y outside real estate is already very significant – just think of:

• Jeff Bezos (43) - Founder/CEO of Amazon.com
• Chris DeWolfe (40) and Tom Anderson (37) - Co-Founders of MySpace
• Michael Dell (39) - Chairman/Founder Dell Computers
• Pierre Omidyar (37) - Chairman/Founder eBay
• David Filo (38) and Jerry Yang (35) - Co-Founders of Yahoo
• Larry Page (35) and Sergey Brin (35) - Co-Founders of Google
• Jeffrey Citron (34) - Chairman/CEO/Co-Founder of Vonage
• Marc Andreessen (33) - Founder of Netscape
• Chad Hurley (30), Steve Chen (29) and Jawed Karim (28), Co-Founders of YouTube
• Mark Zuckerberg (23), Dustin Moskovitz (23) and Chris Hughes (24), Co-Founders of Facebook

They have unquestionably forever left their Internet footprint on society and business.

In real estate they expected to also make their mark – Echo Boomers (Gen Y) have been listed as the next major generational event – the next “bubble” if you will - their impact being compared to that of the Boomers.

Younger home buyers are a bigger portion of the total home-buying population than ever before, and they aren’t putting homeownership on hold for marriage or other life events.  U.S. Census Bureau data shows that homeownership among the under-30 crowd has been rising.  In 1993 less than 15% of people younger than 25 owned their own home but by 2006, 25% in this age group were homeowners.  About 33% of people between the ages of 25 and 29 owned a home in 1993; by 2006 42% were homeowners. 

The younger buyers’ appetite for homeownership is contributing to the recent resurgence of many downtown areas, as well as the increase in condo sales from 6% of the total market a decade ago to 13% in 2006.

According to the 2008 Swanepoel Trends Report these folks are widely recognized as a determined, daring and smart group that grew up in a period in which the Internet already existed.   “They have surfed, watched, recorded, listened and downloaded just about everything they can and are now driving innovative change in the way we live,” says Stefan Swanepoel, author of the new 170-page report. (For more information read The Young, Daring & Smart in the 2007 Swanepoel Trends REPORT and Shattered Glass in the 2008 Swanepoel Trends REPORT.)