Real Estate Professionals: Are You Stuck Selling New Homes to Yesterday’s Buyers?
Understand the next generation’s needs and longings for home
Back in 1992, my husband and I carved out a 2 acre lot from 20 acres of woodland in Lancaster County, PA, home of the Amish, and built a custom home in the country. We’ve been here ever since, as our sons grew from childhood into adulthood and left our ‘nest.’ But in those nearly 25 years the woodland that gave us our sense of privacy has now be partitioned and sold off to a developer, Landmark Homes.
The new neighborhood features premium-priced homes, upscale for our area, but a step below the luxury-priced offerings from Toll Brothers. At first glance it looks like a perfect place for higher-income families to move and raise their school-aged children, like we did back in the 90s. But I am surprised to find that about 70-80% of the new homes are being bought by mature Baby Boomers, many a few years older than my huband and me, not Millennials or GenXers on the road to affluence.
The seniors moving in are very much the ‘millionaires next door,’ that Thomas Stanley and William Danko wrote so eloquently about, not the young HENRYs (high-earners-not-rich-yet) that the community should be drawing. So why is this new development of upscale homes becoming a retirement community, rather than one attracting young families with upper-middle incomes?
My guess is that Landmark Homes doesn’t really understand the next generation of affluent home buyers. Rather they are selling to the same Baby Boomer home buyers that they’ve always sold to and grown accustomed to.
They are missing the big opportunity that young HENRYs with growing families and prospering careers represent. These next generation home buyers could become a revenue stream for the company not just today but tomorrow, as many will inevitably have the need and desire to move up into a more exclusive community of even bigger, higher-priced homes.
Real-estate professionals need to understand the young HENRY home buyers with money to invest, but new needs and priorities
Real-estate professionals catering to the ‘carriage trade’ cannot afford to keep selling homes in the same way they always have done. What worked for Boomers won’t work for the next generation of home buyers. Real-estate professionals need to understand the next generation home buyers with new needs, new expectations and new priorities in the housing market.
To give real-estate professionals insights to succeed with the next generation of high-end home buyers, Unity Marketing has published a new trend report, Marketing Real Estate in New-Luxury Style: A one-size-fits-all strategy won’t work. This report includes eye-opening statistics, powerful analysis and spot on take aways about today’s high-end consumer and how to thrive selling to a new more value-oriented next generation home customer.
To understand the luxury home real-estate market, you need three perspectives:
- Demographics of customers who can afford to buy luxury homes
- Purchase behavior of those ‘qualified’ buyers
- Consumer psychology reveals how to talk and communicate with each special luxury home buyer segment based upon their special needs and desires in their homes.
This report provides all three. Plus, it includes a special section devoted to the next generation of luxury home buyers – the Millennials – and their aspirations about the homes they have in their future.
