Millennials aren’t in a rush to buy their own homes. Heck, many of them aren’t in a rush to move out of their parents’ houses.
That doesn’t mean, however, that they’ll remain renters—or freeloaders in mom and dad’s basement—forever. And the housing and mortgage industries can’t wait.
“The story line has been that millennials are not forming households, they’re living with mom and dad,” said Jonathan Smoke, chief economist for Realtor.com. But this group’s usage of mobile real estate applications and websites is on the rise, Smoke says, up 61% year-over-year as of July based on his analysis of comScore data of people between the ages of 25 and 34. More than one-third of millennials used a mobile device in July to look at real estate data, he said.