'Buyer Bump' Coming Soon

Cooling home prices may be the calm before the "wave" of young and first-time homebuyers that is about to hit the housing market, according to a new study.

From 2019 to 2028, 44.9 million Americans will turn 34, the current median age for first-time homebuyers, a 7.4 percent increase over the past decade. Even though prices are "going through a reset," more Baby Boomers, who are often aging in place, will need to downsize to add more inventory to the market, as prices are sure to appreciate again in the future, per Zillow's analysis.

Millennials hold such fascination partly because they are a massive generation, and that generational heft has yet to fully hit the home-buying market. The largest 3-year cohort in the U.S. is only 24 to 26 years old, yet the median age of the first-time home buyer is 34.

To imagine the scale of the Millennial generation’s impact on housing, let’s look at the size of the U.S. population ages 35 to 44 relative to the cohort aged 24 to 33. We’ll call the older set “past first-time home buyers” and the younger set “up-and-coming” first- time buyers. There are 3.11 million more up-and-coming than past first-time home buyers.

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