Reply to Genz and millennials don't want your small starter homes want forever homes now

Forum Index » Real Estate

Reply to "Genz and millennials don't want your small starter homes want forever homes now"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am an elder millennial stuck in our starter home we bought a decade ago because housing values have risen much faster than wages. I really wish we could go back in time and just stretched and bought a slightly bigger house a decade ago. Those houses that were $100-$200 above our budget a decade ago are now entirely out of reach. [/quote]

That's what happened to us, too. The housing prices rose faster than our salaries. While we would have qualified, we did not feel comfortable with taking out that much.

Years later, we have paid off our starter home and have no more mortgage. I do like not having that monthly payment any longer. [/quote]

We are in our "starter condo" for the same reason -- we bought it because we wanted to start building equity and we were getting outbid on ever SFH we bid on (all tiny, unrenovated -- "starter homes") even though we were stretching to the tippy top of our budget. A lot of the places we missed out on were snapped up by developers to flip, and we just felt like we couldn't compete because a buyer like that can come in with cash and waive certain contingencies that we couldn't as first time home buyers financing the purchase. So we bought a condo we could afford and figured even if it didn't appreciate, we would build equity via mortgage payments and continue to save and be able to afford a house within 5-7 years.

Well it's been 12 years. It's probably appreciated a little, but SFHs near us have appreciated way faster and even our equity and extra savings have not kept up. We make more than we did, but now we have a kid, and the lifestyle we'd have to adopt to afford one of those houses just does not seem feasible for a family saving for college. Plus we have to deal with schools which eliminates certain less expensive options because the schools are worse than where we currently live (which only has mediocre schools anyway). So we're stuck unless we move somewhere with lower COL.

If we do that, we intend to buy a "forever home." Like we are even factoring grandkids and retirement plans, and feasibility of living there with mobility issues. Because we don't want to get stuck again and we don't want to assume we'll be able to afford to live to somewhere else that suits a future lifestyle shift.

The time when we could have bought some tiny unrenovated house in a dodgy neighborhood is just over. It's too late. We have to think about our kid's education and safety, our own bandwidth for renovating or living in a house with serious issues, and our ability to grow into the home over time. We would happily have bought a house like that in our 20s or early 30s. We tried! We couldn't compete with developers or whoever else was snapping those up. And now a house like that just would not work for where we are at in life.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics