Dive Brief:
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It’s not that millennials don’t want to talk to their contractors, real estate agents, and bankers. It’s just that they’d rather text.
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Young homebuyers are putting pressure on housing professionals—who often are older than their clients—to make it easy for them to search for listings, take virtual tours, and ask questions via their smartphones, according to U.S. News & World Report.
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The magazine’s suggestion for the pros: Do it. Mobile-ready websites and apps are a must for any business hoping to claim clients who belong to a generation that some say could surpass the baby boomers as the largest homebuying group as soon as this year.
Dive Insight:
More than 80 million millennials were born between 1977 and 2000, making them the largest generation. And with heft comes influence.
“Because of their size, whatever they decide to do will have an impact on the housing market,” Nela Richardson, chief economist for real estate company Redfin, told U.S. News.
So far, they’ve shown a serious preference for technology over face-to-face or telephone communication. In fact, more than half of millennial house hunters begin their home searches on their phones, and 26% of them typically wind up buying a home they found that way, the National Association of Realtors has said.