Here’s where millennials are escaping their parents’ basements

Since I’m a self-obsessed millennial, it’s flattering to know that a multibillion-dollar mortgage company spends a lot of time thinking about me.

Ellie Mae, a company that makes mortgage software, publishes what it calls a Millennial Tracker every month to keep tabs on how many home loans me and my friends are closing. It has some good news for us!

More of us are buying, and we’re getting less skittish about diving into the market. Homebuyers my age are less worried about paying for a mortgage without a spouse’s additional income—63 percent of millennial buyers in the past 3 years were single.

Contrary to what your Instagram feed says, most millennials are settling down in places outside urban areas. The #1 destination for us in December 2018 was every hipster’s dream of…Somerset, Pennsylvania.

But wait, isn’t there an affordable housing shortage? How are all these Youngs buying homes?

Funny enough, the average mortgages Ellie Mae tracked was $195k—which is way below the median home prices in the U.S. A new home in the middle of the market will run you $325k and an existing home $253k.

What’s this all mean?

Like we’ve been saying all along, the housing market ticks along no matter what the data or housing experts say. People need places to live and will find homes to buy.

If we can’t afford to live in San Francisco, we’ll move to Somerset, Pennsylvania.

Tough real estate markets definitely make the home search harder, but if you have your heart set on home ownership, you’re not going to give up and settle for renting for the long term.

We millennials will escape the basement one way or another.
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Reference:

– Ellie Mae Millennial Tracker (Ellie Mae)

– Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States (St. Louis Fed)

– Median Sales Price of Existing Homes (St. Louis Fed)