Gen Zers Are Entering the Housing Market as First-Time Buyers, but Where Are They Searching?

According to The New York Times, many young adults are facing challenges as they look to buy their first homes. Rising mortgage rates and home prices are forcing more and more young people to look for affordable housing not in busy metropolitan areas, but in midsize cities.

A report from Lending Tree shows that members of Generation Z, characterized by those born between 1997 and 2012, make up 10 percent of homebuyers across America’s largest metro areas in 2021. The platform scanned mortgage offers and isolated 18 to 24-year-old borrowers to better determine which midsize cities Gen Zers are favoring.

Salt Lake City topped the list, retaining the No. 1 spot from last year, with 16.6 percent of its mortgage offers going to Gen Z borrowers. The city has finance, medical and tech industries as a draw for young professionals, said Jacob Channel, the senior economic analyst for LendingTree.

The study’s results were dominated by inland cities, as more workers abandoned coastal areas. Louisville, Ky. climbed into the No. 2 spot from seventh place the previous year, and Oklahoma City fell one spot into third place. At the bottom were the notoriously expensive coastal cities of San Jose, Calif., New York and San Francisco.

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