Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Millennials have gotten screwed by the housing market.
Several suspects have been blamed for this, includinghouse-hoarding baby boomersandgreedy corporate landlords.
But population forecasts for the coming decade suggest a monumental shift is on the horizon.
Don’t get me wrong: Cheaper housing is a good thing.
Builders and policymakers, however, haven’t been great at reading the tea leaves.
Take the current housing crunch.
Cuetough times for millennials.
But some real estate experts are starting to pay more attention to the underlying realities.
But based on the demographic data, Shah expects home prices to stall out in the 2030s.
“Demographics play a critical role in home prices,” Shah says.
“And right now, the future projections on demographics are not rosy.”
In the coming decade, baby boomers will begin “aging out of the market” in droves.
Their exodus will represent a sea change in the housing market.
The result will be a lot less demand for homes.
With more deaths and fewer births, the total number of US-born people in the country will shrink.
The next generation of new homeowners won’t represent a steep dropoff in demand.
“The pickup in mortality is going to outpace that.”
In the 2000s, they built 17 million.
As demand for homes slows down, McCue says, construction should have a chance to catch up.
That possibility should sound tantalizing to anyone hoping for an end to our housing shortage.
Millennials aren’t young upstartsanymore.
While things are looking up, that may not last.
Most of that increase 41 percentage points came from real estate.
To illustrate this tension, compare a hypothetical baby boomer with a hypothetical millennial.
Each buys a $300,000 home during their heyday.
The boomer bought the house in 1994.
The millennial buys the house in 2010 and also holds on to it for 30 years.
The home ends up being worth about $813,000, a 171% increase.
Forecasting home prices a decade from now is a fraught endeavor.
But demographic change is inevitable.
“I think we still need to get our heads around the implications of that.”
If the housing shortage does indeed go away, it will hardly be mourned.
But any big shift usually comes with some collateral damage.
In this case, it could be homeowning millennials who get burned.
James Rodriguezis a senior reporter on Business Insider’s Discourse team.
