Only 12% of Adults Plan to Buy a Home Within Next 12 Months

Most people are not in the market for a house. But if they are, they’re most likely to be millennials, according to the NAHB's Housing Trends Report for the third quarter. The percent of prospective homebuyers has hovered around 12 to 13% for the past year, and it has not broken above 20% since Q4 of 2017.

Only 12% of adults are considering the purchase of a home within the next 12 months, according to NAHB’s Housing Trends Report for the third quarter of 2019. This share of ‘prospective home buyers’ is essentially unchanged from where it stood a year earlier, at 13%. For the majority of these buyers (60%), this will be their first time buying a home, about the same share as a year earlier (61%).

Millennials (age 23 to 38) are the most likely generation to be making plans to purchase a home within a year (20%), followed by Gen X (age 39 to 54) (12%) and Gen Z (age 18 to 22) (11%). In contrast, only 6% of Boomers (age 55 to 73) reported plans to purchase a home. Geographically, respondents in the South and West are slightly more likely to be planning a home purchase (13% and 12%, respectively) than those in the Northeast and Midwest (both at 11%).

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