A new Urban Land Institute-commissioned survey of young Americans’ housing preferences found that half of millennial respondents rent their homes, and that they remain as resolute as in past years to eventually own a home. This article from The Wall Street Journal offers some interesting insight into the survey results.
More millennials are renting now than were five years ago, but most of them still aspire to live in single-family, detached homes in the near future. The number of respondents renting their homes is up markedly from the results in 2010, when 37% of respondents were renters. The survey found that 70% of millennials anticipate owning a home by 2020. That’s a tad higher than the 67% who said in the 2010 survey that they foresaw being homeowners by 2015.
Many economists, housing analysts and home builders posit that millennials, also called Generation Y, will start buying homes and moving to the suburbs. Yet many forecasters just can’t say for certain if that will start in earnest this year, next or five years from now.
“The Great Recession has not dimmed Generation Y’s preference for single-family homes, mostly detached,” wrote Leanne Lachman, the survey’s co-author.
