How Their Lil’ Ones Are Shaping Millennials' Home-Buying Plans

Millennials are one fortunate lot ─ their parents swore not to make the same mistake they perceived their parents made in their upbringing. They were going to raise children who would be confident, ambitious, self-dependent and acutely conscious of self-worth.

To give them their due, they seem to have done a fine job at that.

Sample this.

When this ambitious group of people has to take the hard call and split leaving behind their large families in smaller towns to look for better-bigger jobs in India’s metropolises, they don’t get flustered. They work hard and make their place in the world, quite similar to the way their parents dreamt, and don’t keep looking back while they are at it. By the time they decide to marry and settle down, they have more disposable income than their parents ever did.

No wonder people born between 1980 and 1999 are the ones flashing nonchalantly their credit cards to purchase costly goods that can help them look, feel and work better. Unlike their parents, they don’t think umpteen times before they make little expenses and save themselves the torture of restraint. They buy homes in their early 20s with the assistance of bank finance; they do not share their parents’ opinion that borrowing is best avoided.

They have been more than generous in passing on the special treatment they received as children. At the same time, they try not to be what is referred to as “helicopter parents”, and have been quite liberal to the concept of “space”. Consequently, their children love their space and do everything to protect it. It is in this context we must speak how they influence our home-purchase decisions.

No kidding

Their personal aspirations prod millennials to buy homes early in their lives. However, unlike their parents, they do not attach undue emotional worth to it ─ when the time comes, they would not blink before they sell the old to settle for a new home. For their child’s sake, they would move to a better home, a better locality, a better city or a better country even, as soon as they have the wherewithal to do that.

As a result of this properties are now purchased and sold more frequently in India, a country where property hold more sentimental value than its actual monetary worth in the heart of the owner.

Those planning to start a family start looking for their own homes; they would not want their child to be born in a rented accommodation. If monetary constraints cast obstacles in the way, efforts are then made to correct the situation by the time the child is able to understand the difference between rented and own homes. Even a 1BHK would do, for the time being.

A child’s consciousness about their personal space grows as they do, and millennials are quick to grasp that. By way of setting new benchmarks in their professional life thus earning better take-home salaries, the millennial parents would plan to buy a bigger house, large enough to give the child the space they deserve. If the professional success is not as roaring as they would want it to be and the salaries do not fatten as much they would have liked, these parents would do some financial juggling, join forces and get a bigger loan to be able to afford a larger house, the monetary stress they might suffer in their daily life notwithstanding.  

Wait till you hear the best part about such home-buying behaviour. As they ripe age-wise, respecting their child’s space, these parents grow the tendency to respect their own spaces along the way. Such a parent is more likely to move to a home more elderly-friendly when they reach an advanced age leaving their progeny be (they know they are special, too, remember?). To cut a long story short, such parents are more likely to invest in retirement homes.

If the ongoing doom and gloom in the world’s key property markets giving one that sinking feeling, they would certainly feel that slight sense of relief if they thought of the millennials, and allow themselves to believe that Gen Y would somehow keep the markets going.