No matter what NAR and media try to tell us, your local markets are what speak to you in the business of real estate.
For years now, NAR and other housing advocates have been using their bull horns to announce how we all must learn how to work with Millenials.
Dozens if not hundreds of articles appeared for years in industry magazines and online with tutorials on how we have to learn how to communicate with the Millenials because they are going to be largest home buying generation ever.
Fast forward to reality: in many markets, this has not translated into the number of projected transactions.
See the thing is… many Millenials care more about buying Avocado toast at $19 and Starbuck's coffee at $ 5 a pop than they do about buying a house.
Just as with all generations, millenials come in two types, those that have the money to buy a house and those that don't.
The lessons the Millenials did learn from watching their parents buy houses they could not afford and then lose those homes to foreclosure was maybe ,just maybe, buying a house is not worth all that stress. Maybe if you really can not afford to live your life the way you want to live your life and own a home along with it, maybe not buying a home is the better option.
For Millenials who don't have the money to put down as a down payment, many of them moved in with their parents after they graduated from college. There are those who perhaps are single moms trying to support their kids and need the support of their own parents just to get by.
There is no judgment here.
What is important to one person may not be important to another person.
When I was growing up, owning a home was what you did to prove you are a responsible adult. But if you don't want to own a home, why should you be made to feel as though you have to just to be called a mature adult?
Where does the Avocado toast story come from?
There is a real estate developer in Australia who is upset that millenials are not buying the real estate he is building because they spend their money on Avocado toast. He was on the Australian version of “60 Minutes” and his story has become viral.
So what he is offering the Millenials is: free avocado toast for 12 months if they will buy his 2 or 3 bedroom townhouses.
A lot of older people think that the priorities of young people are messed up. Well, young people are that, they are young. They may not at this time fully comprehended the fact that every choice has a consequence. But it is still their choice.
Instead of spending all the money the media and NAR, etc did trying to get real estate agents to understand how to sell a millenial a house, maybe that money would have been better spent in research on why they think the way they do, what drives them to make the decisions that they do.
For many Millenials, they say they want to enjoy life without the stress they see their parents live through. They want to be able to move around, be mobile, and not stuck with a house payment for 30 years.
The best research was right in front of our eyes. One of the things the politicians were counting on was that they could mandate young people to buy health insurance. They worked tirelessly barking up the wrong tree. They even created media and videos to try to reach the young people and get them enrolled into the Obamacare. It fell on deaf ears.
The majority of the young people do not have any interest in buying healthcare. I am not saying this is right or wrong. What I am saying is, they are not thinking about health insurance. Youth don't think about the future in those terms.
This huge miscalculation which only proved how out of touch the government is with young people, was one that anyone who is trying to figure out this generation could have seen coming.
There will be millennials that buy homes but not anywhere near the projections from several years ago.
So if you are in a market where there are a lot of Millennials maybe you can offer to buy them a year supply of Avocado toast if they buy from you.