Buying a House Could Get Easier for Millennials. There’s Just One Big Problem…

Dave:
The housing market dynamics that we’ve relied on for generations are changing the days when you could buy a home, live in it for 30 years and then retire off. The appreciation might be coming to a close, but just because the Boomer real estate playbook is dead doesn’t mean you can’t use real estate to your long-term financial advantage. And today we’re going to talk about how, Hey everyone, I’m Dave head of Real Estate Investing here at BiggerPockets, and today on the show we are talking with business insider reporter James Rodriguez about a recent article he wrote called The Millennial Home Buying Predicament. In this article, James talks about a long-term shift that experts are seeing in the housing market. Baby boomers, they’re aging out of their homes and US population growth is slowing. So even though not enough new homes are being built, it is possible that housing supply could actually catch up with housing demand over the next few decades.
And of course, if that happens, it’ll have huge effects on how much home prices appreciate during that time. Lots of boomers have seen home prices they bought back in the nineties, triple in value since then. So the question is, can millennials expect homes that they’re maybe buying today to follow that same trend? We’re going to talk about that with James today and much more. And then at the end of the episode, stick around because I’m going to share with you my own take on what this all means for real estate investors because James’s article is mostly focused on people buying their primary homes to live in. But these same demographic dynamics that homes will rise in value over several decades underpin almost every thesis of long-term real estate investing. So at the end, I’ll tell you what I think is likely to happen and how I’m accounting for demographic changes and population growth shifts in my own investing. But that’s going to be at the end of the episode. First, here’s my conversation with Business Insider real estate reporter James Rodriguez. James, welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast Network. Thanks for joining us.

James:
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be back.

Dave:
For our audience who hasn’t listened to some of your previous appearances here or on the market, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?

James:
Yeah, so I’m a senior real estate reporter at Business Insider. I work on a team that focuses on answering big questions or diving into big ideas in the world. And for me that means diving into the big questions in the housing market, so how it works, why certain things work the way they do, and also trying to look ahead to the future and where the housing market is headed from here.

Dave:
Well, you’ve done a great job at it. I read a lot of your work and one of the most recent articles that you wrote was about this interesting predicament that may materialize in the housing market where appreciation, which as real estate investors and as homeowners, we all have sort of come to rely on may actually start slowing down. Can you just tell us a little bit about the fundamentals that you’re writing about here?

James:
Yeah, so this is really all about demographics, population trends, births and deaths. And while demographics can’t tell us everything about housing demand, they can give us a pretty good idea of how many people are going to be wanting homes, what the landscape is going to look like for home buyers and sellers, and talking to people about this. It became really clear that household growth is going to be slowing down significantly. And that comes down to basically baby boomers aging out of the market, a euphemistic term for dying essentially. So you have all these baby boomers that are hitting, they’re going to be hitting 80 next year, 66 million people. It’s the second largest living generation today, and they control a huge portion of the housing market. So when you have that homeownership going away, you have millennials and Gen Z, which slightly smaller than millennials coming in and frankly in uncertain future around immigration. And it creates this scenario where if you bring a lot of these assumptions forward 10 or 15 years, you’re looking at much lower home appreciation, potentially home prices falling in some years because of this imbalance between boomers aging and also the generations behind them coming in.

Dave:
So it sounds like we might see demographic challenges on both ends of the population curve. So we are seeing less births and as you said, there’s uncertainty about the future of immigration that sort of takes care of one side of the picture here, which is how many new people we’re adding to the population in the US. At the same time, baby boomers who were once the biggest generation now are a little bit smaller than millennials are reaching an age where they’re starting to die off. And so these two things combine potentially could lead to lower household formation. And if you haven’t heard that term before, household formation, it’s similar to population and population growth, but it’s actually a bit more relevant to housing because population can go up and down and households, the number of housing units that are required in the United States could fluctuate and move in a different direction.
This is an example I often give, but basically there are, let’s just imagine there are two people who live together as roommates and then they decide to each get their own one bedroom apartment that would create two households, that would be one new household, but without the population changing. And so as we talk about demographic trends and supply and demand in the housing market, that term households and household formation is a super important thing to remember. Now, James, you did a great job sort of explaining the high level trends that are going on here, but I have to admit, people have been saying this about the baby boomers for a long time, at least 10, 12 years. There’s this term that maybe you’ve heard of called the silver tsunami, where I think as far back as 2014 people were saying all the houses are going to hit the housing at the same time when boomers start dying off or they’re going to move to assisted living and that’s going to cause this glut of supply in the housing market. Obviously that has not materialized as of late. So what is different about what you’re saying here than what we’ve been hearing and hasn’t come true in the last couple of years?

James:
So this storyline that I lay out in the story is really much more gradual. I’ve talked to experts who have described it more as a silver glacier. It’s slow moving, but over time you see these effects. And so the experts that I was talking to in the papers that I was reading, they’re not talking about all of a sudden millions of baby boomers are just gone overnight. And it’s like the flip of a switch where home prices crash. What this argument is really talking about is a much slower, more gradual decline is household growth slows down. It’s not even that the population necessarily in the US is even falling, but that with the smaller household growth, with more boomers dying off and they control about 41% of real estate in the US today. So over the next decade, decade and a half as that happens, you in theory would start to see home prices start to level off, maybe grow slightly in some years, decline slightly in some years. This company that I was talking to, home llc, they’re a housing analytics and consulting firm and they project home prices to grow in the 2030s, maybe a percent, half a percent every year, averaging out some of those. And so it’s not the kind of silver tsunami giant crash that I think people have hyped up frankly, but it’s still pretty significant when you look back at the home prices growing during the pandemic by 50% from the start to now. And so that’s an extreme difference.

Dave:
It is, and I just have to say generally I find these types of analyses where they say something’s going to change slowly, much more credible, especially in the housing market. So there’s more fun and you’ll get more YouTube clicks if you say there’s going to be a silver tsunami. But looking at long-term trends, and especially with demographics, these things move slowly. So that does lend some credibility, at least in my book, to the analysis that you’re reporting on here. Now, one point of clarification, James, you said that prices might grow half percent, 1%. Is that nominal, like non inflation adjusted home prices or are those real inflation adjusted prices?

James:
Yeah, so that’s nominal.

Dave:
Oh wow.

James:
And so yeah, you think about the real returns that somebody would be seeing over that timeframe, and it starts to be a much, much more bleak picture for people who own homes, say somebody who’s buying a home now and they didn’t collect all that appreciation during the pandemic, and they may be counting on reaping similar benefits to previous generations. I think something to consider here too is real estate, as I’m sure you mentioned a lot in your podcast, is very local. So this is a very broad national picture. So within individual markets it could be very different based on how the market is growing. But taking that average nationwide and you think about the increase in which baby boomers are going to be aging out over the next decade, it’s really significant. Their numbers are projected to shrink by about 23% or about 15.6 million people out of 66 million baby boomers today. Wow, that’s a lot. And you think that’s a lot of real estate they own too?

Dave:
Absolutely. A couple things. First and foremost, thank you for mentioning that this is a national trend and we are going to probably continue mostly talking about nationally because it’s very difficult for us to predict local or regional housing market trends in the 2030s at this point. So I think it’s safe to say, and for our audience, just remember that this is not going to happen everywhere. Equally, it might happen everywhere, but there’s going to be differences in regions. Some regions might still grow faster than the national average. So just keep that in mind. The second thing, just to clarify what I asked James earlier, is that it’s really important as investors for us to compare our returns and the growth in our money to the rate of inflation, because as you probably know, inflation is the devaluation of your dollar. It means that prices go up and you get to buy less with every dollar that you have.
And so what I asked James is the prices nominal or real nominal means not inflation adjusted and real means inflation adjusted. And what James said is that prices may only go up half a percent or 1% in nominal non inflation adjusted returns. And so that means if you think about that, just imagine a world where the fed gets our inflation target back to what they want, which is like 2%. And so that means if your home price is only going 1% and inflation is at 2%, that your home value is not keeping pace with inflation, that’s assuming that you buy it for all cash. But that’s just how you should probably be thinking about that as an investor. We’ve gotten used to for decades, for centuries, honestly, that home prices have at least kept pace with inflation in the long-term average. And if that changes, that is a very, very significant difference that as investors we’re all going to have to think about and adjust to.
Alright, so we do have to take a quick break, but when we come back, James, I’d love to talk to you a little bit more about sort of the other side of the equation. We’ve talked a little bit about demand here, but let’s get into the supply side right after this before we move on. Today’s show is brought to you by simply the all in one CRM built for real estate investors. Automate your marketing skip trace for free, send direct mail and connect with your leads all in one place. Head over to emmp.com/biggerpockets now to start free trial and get 50% off your first month.
Hey everyone, welcome back to the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast. I’m here with reporter James Rodriguez talking about a really interesting potential dynamic that’s forming in the housing market where we might see lower demand for housing starting in the 2030s and maybe beyond that. Now, James, we’ve talked a little bit about demand. We’ve talked about baby boomers reaching this age where they’re dying off or moving into assisted living. We’ve talked about some smaller generations coming. You’ve talked a little bit about immigration. Can we dig in there a little bit? Maybe you could just tell us about how immigration has traditionally played a role in both supply and demand in the housing market and where it might be going from here.

James:
So if population growth is indeed falling, and at 1.1 of the professors that I talked to for this story, they talk about if you see these trends continuing where you have more deaths, fewer births, eventually we’re going to reach this point where population growth in the US will be entirely reliant on immigration. So the assumptions that I’m talking about here, it basically brings forward kind of a baseline estimation of annual immigration, net immigration being about 870,000 people. The interesting thing about immigration is that’s really, it’s kind of the easiest lever to pull here in terms of policy. It may be harder to incentivize builders to build a lot, but you can incentivize demand by just allowing more people into the country. And so I think it makes it, the biggest question mark here is what is immigration going to look like in the future? Is it going to be enough to offset some of this slowdown that we’re seeing in population? And if immigration increases substantially, then we’re looking at a very different scenario than the one that I’ve outlined here. But even if you assume higher immigration, the basic outline of this trend still holding where with slower household growth that could allow construction to catch up. And if that happens, you’re seeing less of this lopsidedness that has really encouraged some of the home price growth or a lot of the home price growth that we’ve seen over the past decade where you have builders basically not keeping pace with the demand for housing.

Dave:
That makes sense to me. I think what you said about having immigration being the big lever is true. And I don’t pretend to know what immigration policy is going to be in the future, but if you look at other countries, right, a lot of countries are facing these declining birth rates and you see places like Japan and South Korea have been trying to incentivize higher birth rates and it’s just not working. And so it’s hard to imagine without some cultural change that birth rates are going to change in the short term. And even if that does happen, that could take 20, 25 years before it has an impact on household formation and housing demand. As you said, builders are sort of fickle businesses, and so it would be very difficult for them to take on the risk of building more homes without some sort of assurances. And so I agree with you that immigration is probably the big lever, how that lever gets pulled or that knob gets turned, we don’t know, but it is something that I think as people who are following and trying to understand the housing market need to keep a close eye on going forward, especially as in five, 10 years from now when some of these trends might start to materialize.
So talk to me more James about builders and how they’re reacting to this. Is this even on their radar? Are they sort of just building for a year from now?

James:
They’re looking ahead and they’re trying to forecast demand, but I think one of the arguments that I’ve seen made and some of the papers that I referenced in the story is that the lever pullers in our country, the builders and the policymakers, they don’t have a great track record of reading the tea leaves decade, decade and a half in the future. And that’s understandable because they have so many present day concerns. And we’re here talking about tariffs and the current immigration issues and what is demand going to look like a year from now? What kind of incentives do builders have to give buyers today to combat higher mortgage rates? So all of that stuff is going on, and I think again, an example of the mismatch that can happen here is these smart builders, builders that they’re trying to make money, but after the great recession, you saw construction activity reaching half a century lows.
And so that’s when this demand wave from millennials was on the way. Everybody, if you looked at the demographics at that time, the way that I’m trying to do in this store, you could see that wave coming. And so that’s a big question mark as well. Every year, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies releases a report that dives into many of the topics that I cover in this paper in terms of what is the demand going to look like in the future, what are the demographics telling us and how much building needs to happen in order to keep pace with that. And so one of the interesting things is that they highlight is America probably needs to build about 11.3 million homes over the next decade to keep up with the population forecasts and just 8 million new units between 2035 and 2045. That’s just the new household formation, the new household demand that’s not accounting for whatever shortage we have today, which depending on where you look, it’s in the millions, but it sounds like a lot of homes, right?
11 million, 8 million. Those are actually pretty modest goals when you look at home building activity. Historically, even during the 2010s, which was one of the weakest decades for home building activity, you saw new construction, again, lowest in more than half a century, builders still finished almost 10 million units, and in the two thousands they built 17 million. So we know that a lot has changed in the home building industry since then. You’ve seen a lot more consolidation, but these are not unreasonable goals here. And so as demand for homes slows down, you could see construction have a chance to catch up and even start to meet some of that shortage that we have today. And so again, that’s a huge question mark here is what construction activity is going to look like. But if you bring some of these assumptions forward, it’s going to be a lot easier for home builders to keep pace.

Dave:
Yeah, I imagine in the short term, builders don’t really care, especially the big ones. They’re publicly traded companies. They’re trying to make a profit in the next six months or a year, and if there’s demand for housing right now, they’re going to build. They don’t really care that much, that home price appreciation might slow in 10 years
As homeowners or real estate investors are people who are going to hold on to inventory over a long period of time. We hear about the direction of home prices and how our equity is going to change. Builders really just care. Can they sell it at their performer price and a reasonable timeframe and get that inventory off their books and book their profits? And so my guess is that we’re not going to see a big change in home building, at least as it pertains to this trend. Of course, home builders are still going to react to interest rates and short-term fluctuations, but I have a hard time imagining them really caring about these long-term trends. So I don’t know if we’re going to get any indication of where supply is going from builders just by nature, and it makes sense. Their business model is short-term.

James:
They’re definitely responding to the economic signals that they’re getting right now, and that’s a very different story than looking 15 years into the future.

Dave:
We do have to take a quick break, but when we come back, James, you wrote extensively about the financial implications of what this actually means for millennials and homeowners, and I’d love to dive into that. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m here with reporter James Rodriguez from Business Insider, and we’re talking about the millennial home buying predicament. James, you did mention that this is mostly focused on millennials, but it does seem like it’s really for all homeowners that this is something that we should be thinking about, or is there something financially that is particularly pertinent for millennials?

James:
I think really the cutoff is did you benefit from these home price gains during the pandemic or over the last couple of decades, or are you buying a home today or in 2022 when the market had at the peak of this frenzy right before interest rates really took off and tamped down demand? What does the future look like for you compared to say, a baby boomer who bought their home in 1994 and has ridden out some of the cycles, but ultimately has a pretty sizable gain here. And so it’s a really starkly different picture.

Dave:
There is a window here where you haven’t benefited from previous equity gains and you’re not benefiting from improved affordability that might come in a couple of years, right? Because I think you can make the argument that a millennial or a Gen Z if you don’t already own home, or if you’re not thinking about buying right now, that this is a net win. Because if prices flatten right now and wages continue to go up and maybe mortgage rates come down, that’s going to be an easier time to buy a home. And so really, right now it seems like a particularly pressing question for people.

James:
I think the only thing I’d add to that is the mentality of home buyers is, and the way that I’ve had it described to me is a lot of people don’t want to catch a falling knife. So if they’re seeing that home prices are maybe declining a little bit or stagnating and the future is murky, they might not look at it as the same valuable asset that they should pour so much of their savings into
As previous generations did. So during the pandemic, we saw a lot of this, I have described it as fomo, buying fear of missing out where people felt like they could see the train leaving. They just wanted to get on however they could because they anticipated future increases in the value of their home. And so you may be willing to stretch yourself today if you think it’ll pay off in the future, say homes get more affordable in the future, but the outlook for appreciation is murky. That could discourage some people from purchasing a home. And of course, I think it’s also really important to mention that home ownership comes with all of these other benefits that aren’t reflected in just the returns you have, the stability you have the 30 year mortgage, which is an incredible gift to homeowners that lets you lock in your payments for decades. You have the tax benefits that come with homeownership and just all the lifestyle of things too, if you want a backyard for your dog, et cetera.

Dave:
Yeah, stability of just knowing where you’re going to live and what your biggest expense is going to be over time. Of course.

James:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. You get into this scenario where, yeah, people might look at home buying differently if they feel like they can’t rely on reaping some of the other financial returns that they’ve seen their maybe boomer parents read.

Dave:
For sure. Yeah. I think at least in the real estate investing community, there is a big debate about your primary residence and whether or not it’s an investment in the first place I fall on the side that it can be if you want it to be, if you go and buy your dream home and overpay for it, that’s not a good investment. But if you do a live and flip or a house hack, there are ways to turn it into a good investment. But I think the broader American culture believes that buying a home is the path to wealth that has proven to be true for previous generations. And I’m not saying that just owning a primary home is going to make you fabulously wealthy, but historically, if you bought a home with debt on it, appreciation has helped at very least been a forced savings account.
With a solid savings rate, you’re probably earning several percentage points at least as good as a bond or a high yield savings account, or probably better. You add that to the amortization and the tax benefits, the stability that you mentioned, it has been a good idea for people for a really long time. And although we’re still a few years away from this, I have to wonder how that might change people’s decision making. Like you said, perhaps people will still buy homes, but they’ll put less money down or they’ll be more ambitious about investing because they’ll need to put money into the stock market or into other investments to earn the returns and plan for retirement without their home. I’m curious though, if anyone you talked to for this story mentioned how behavior might change among home buyers in the future.

James:
It could very well be this recalibration of what exactly is a home supposed to function as? And I think the thing that I think about a lot is this paradox of the housing market, which is people are rooting for affordability. They want to get their foot in the door, but also homeowners are rooting for appreciation and seeing the value of their home go up. And so those things are kind of diametrically opposed. And finding a balance, I think is the key where it’s not insane home a price appreciation like we’ve seen during the pandemic, but also not the kind of falling knife scenario that I mentioned. And so it’ll be really interesting to see how people adjust their expectations in the future if this does play out the way that it could.

Dave:
Yeah. And that dynamic, at least to me, is not new, right? There is always sort of this push and pull between existing homeowners who want to maintain, at the very least, maintain the value of their properties or increase them, and then people who are advocating for more housing, more supply to make housing more affordable. And like you said, I believe that some sense of balance is the right thing. For many years, we saw home prices modestly outpace inflation. For me, that would be a great thing that we could get back to where people aren’t losing their nest egg, but also the American dream of home ownership remains attainable for the majority of Americans. And we’ve been in this crazy housing market for years where that is not the case, and I certainly hope we don’t sort of swing in the total opposite direction and instead we can land somewhere else in the middle. Well, James, thank you so much. This has been amazing. Is there anything else we missed here that you think our audience should know?

James:
I think that really covers it. I think it’s important to keep in mind that there are a lot of assumptions going into this, but also I think looking at the demographics is really fascinating because it tells the story that’s kind of divorced from the economic side of things and the shocks and all of that. And it really just gets into how many people are going to have looking for homes and how is that going to change in the future? And if we had paid attention to some of these demographic signals in the past, we could have maybe been better predicted what happened during the pandemic. Of course, the pandemic and low interest rates was its own shock. But when you just look at the population trends, they tell a story that I think is compelling and something that I think everyone should at least be paying attention to and thinking about as we move forward and look ahead to next decade, decade plus.

Dave:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, James. We appreciate you being here.

James:
Thank you. Great to be here.

Dave:
All right. Another big thanks to James. Before we go, I just want to share one or two thoughts because this trend, if it does materialize, could really change our entire industry. Long-term appreciation has been sort of one of the bedrocks of not just real estate investing and of the upside error principles that I’ve been talking about, but about American home ownership and honestly, a lot of American society. So should people investing now be worried that homes are going to become less valuable or they’re not going to keep pace with inflation in the future? And my feeling right now is that it’s still a little bit too early to understand exactly how this is all going to play out. A lot of that is because we’ve been in this very weird unusual housing market for the last five years that it’s hard to get a true sense of where supply and demand really lies.
And until the housing market normalizes a bit more, I think it’s really difficult to project into the 2030s. That said, the demographic trends are sort of easy to predict, right? These are really slow moving things. We know how many people are in Gen Z, we know what the birth rate is. And although that can change, the trend has been steadily moving downward for quite a long time, and it’s hard to imagine that’s going to shift. And even if it does start to reverse, that’s probably going to happen slowly as well. And so I think at least the way I’m going to treat this is I am going to start thinking about how to mitigate this, not right now. This is not sort of one of the priority top concerns on my mind, but in the next year or two, I think I’m going to start thinking about one, what regions are likely going to be able to offset some of these demographic trends?
It honestly makes me think, what I’ve often believed and talked about is that buying in markets where there is going to be at least solid appreciation and focusing more on that than cashflow might be something that I start prioritizing more. And I’ll talk about that more on the show. And then similar to the question that I asked James, what asset classes are going to remain in demand? Because there are still going to be assets, certain neighborhoods, certain types of homes that are going to grow faster than inflation, faster than the national average. And we as a community should probably start thinking about that over the next couple of years. But again, it’s not something that I’m going to run and start selling my portfolio and reshifting everything right now, but it’s something that I’m going to start thinking about a lot more over the next couple of years.
So that’s the first thought. The second thing is, to me, this trend sort of underscores the reason why real estate investors and Americans in general really need to take retirement into their own hands because we’re talking about sort of really big fundamental shifts in American society here, where if home price appreciation isn’t what it has been for the last several decades or the last century, that is going to eliminate one of the most reliable paths to retirement and to having sort of a nest egg that we’ve had in the United States. The other thing is, we talk about this a little bit on the show, but social security is set to become insolvent and not pay out fully in 2035. We don’t know where that’s going to go, and it’s going to take a lot of twists and turns, but we’re talking about two sort of bedrocks of American retirement being up in the air.
And for me, that just underscores why everyone, whether it’s through real estate investing or 401k or starting your own business, really needs to think about how to take your financial future and retirement into their own hands. And I still, despite everything that James just said, believe that real estate is the best way to pursue financial independence. I actually created a whole video about this. If you want to watch this on YouTube or listen to the episode, you can check it out. It’s from January 16th, 2025. But I still believe that real estate is an excellent way to pursue financial freedom. If that changes in the future, I will let you know. But for the time being, I still don’t see any other better way that you can improve your own financial future than through real estate investing. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode. I assume that you’re going to all have a lot of questions about this data. If you do, if you’re watching on YouTube, make sure to put the comments below. Or if you’re listening on audio, you could always hit me up either on BiggerPockets or on Instagram where I’m at the data deli. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’ll see you next time.