A national trend shifts. More millennials are buying homes in the suburbs
Move over, Gen X and Baby Boomers. Millennials are about to disrupt the suburbs.
For years, the conventional wisdom held that millennials were rejecting the suburbs, and even homeownership itself, in favor of a downtown lifestyle. “That’s been the main theme for the last 10 years, that millennials want to live downtown in high-rise buildings, they don’t want yards to mow, and they don’t want cars,’’ said Realtor.com senior economist George Ratiu. “And it turns out, in the last two years especially, the most popular homes for millennials have been single-family detached homes in the suburbs.’’
Forty-four percent of recent millennial home buyers purchased in the suburbs, compared with 39 percent in urban areas, according to Zillow’s 2019 Consumer Housing Trends Study. Millennials are still more likely to buy in the city than other generations, but the findings mark a small but notable shift from the prior two years, when 43 percent of millennial home purchases were in urban areas. “Millennials buy homes in the suburbs more than anywhere else, and as they age into prime home-buying years, this is increasingly true,’’ said Zillow economist Kathryn Coursolle.