Connecting with Clients in
GENERATION
ast winter, REALTOR® Amanda Wycoff, with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Snyder Real Estate in Bloomington, completed a home sale for a couple who had already tried to sell their $90,000 house three years prior. Though the couple’s job situation was stable, their home value took a big hit during the 2008 recession. “They were taking a loss, and they were cautious about putting any money into the house,” Wycoff recalled. “They had been wanting for years to get their ‘move up’ home and the value of the house was so crucial to make that happen. They were finally able to buy their next home, but it took a while to get there, and they even stalled their family plans. “That story encompasses so many Gen Xers I’m working with lately.” Though the generations of Baby Boomers and Millennials are most often Wycoff talked about, studied and even targeted, there is a group sandwiched between those that tends to be overlooked. For REALTORS® today, this generation is the one proving to be a driving force in the current market: Generation X, defined by the National 22 www.IllinoisRealtors.org
X TIPS for Giving Attention to Real Estate’s
“Middle Child”
Association of REALTORS® (NAR) as people born between 1965 and 1979. According to the National Association of REALTORS® 2017 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends study, which evaluates the generational differences of recent home buyers and sellers, home purchases from Generation X reached 28 percent in 2016, which increased from 26 percent in 2015. This makes this group the only generation to purchase more homes last year than the previous year. (Millennials bought the most homes overall, however; Millennials purchased about 34 percent of the homes on the market in 2016.)
By Courtney Westlake Monica Neubauer, a Nashvillebased REALTOR®, teaches NAR’s continuing education courses called Senior Real Estate Specialist Designation Course and Generation Buy, both of which examine generational differences and expectations among clients. While Baby Boomers and Millennials are “worthy of attention,” Neubauer said Generation X is certainly gaining attention within the real estate industry today. “For real estate agents, they’re a generation we should be paying attention to, if we’re not already,” she said. “It’s like the middle child has been content playing by themselves for a while, and now they’re saying ‘we actually do things differently! Pay attention!’ They’re making themselves known, and they’re at their peak earning years right now, so financially, they’re becoming a powerhouse.” Generation X was hit hard with the recession of 2008: on average, Gen X sellers today purchased their home 10 years ago, and one in five said they wanted to sell earlier but couldn’t because their home had been worth less than their mortgage, according to NAR. They are also still weighed down with debt. Twenty-nine percent of Generation X said that student loan