A recent analysis of roughly 3.4 million mortgage purchase requests from LendingTree revealed that Gen Zers made up nearly 15% of potential homebuyers across the nation’s 50 largest metro areas. Their home searches centered mostly on affordable markets such as Salt Lake City, where 22.6% of loan requests came from Gen-Z applicants, followed by Oklahoma City, Okla., at 22.4%, and Birmingham, Ala., at 20.8%, The New York Times reports.
Gen-Z buyers were least attracted to costly metro areas like San Francisco, New York, and San Jose, Calif., where the youngest homebuying generation accounted for 7.76%, 8.88%, and 9.7% of applicants, respectively.
Many Gen Z-ers who came of age during the past couple of years missed out on the record-low mortgage rates of 2020 and 2021. But even with higher rates now in place, Mr. [Jacob] Channel expects the number of Gen Z home buyers to grow from here.
“Even though you might hear a lot of doom and gloom and people might say, ‘Well, Gen Z-ers will never be able to buy a house,’ they said the same thing about millennials, and millennials are the largest group of home buyers in America,” he said.