"We Don't Give a Crap About Interest Rates." Baby Boomers are Flexing Their Equity Muscles

VALLEJO, Calif. - Rezul -- These are my people - adults ages 60 to 78 (I'm 62) appear to be brushing off current housing challenges more easily than other age groups. Yeah, we've been around the block a few times and have "tough skin." "Who cares about interest rates when we have equity."

The ages of 60 and 78 — the baby boomer generation— are commanding a sizable presence in the housing market lately, regaining their top spot as the largest share of home buyers in the coming years. They accounted for 42% of buyers and 53% of sellers, the highest of any other age group.

They're being motivated to buy or sell by the desire to move closer to family, friends and relatives, retirement, or wanting to downsize into a smaller home since many of them are also known as "empty nesters," a label meaning that all their children "flew the coop," are grown, married and many with young families of their own.

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Cash is King

Baby boomers have overtaken millennials—the largest U.S. population—to become the top generation of home buyers as of this writing. What's striking is that half of older boomers and two out of five younger boomers are purchasing homes entirely with cash from the equity of their present home.

Older adults have stayed in their current homes longer than other age groups (a median of 16 years among 70- to 78-year-olds and 13 years among 60- to 69-year-olds), allowing them to ride the wave of growing home appreciation over recent years. This was know as "The Great Stay-Put when Americans treated homes like family heirlooms (and five years ago those 2% mortgages are relationship goals).

Older adults are the most likely to leverage their equity from a previous home sale for their next home purchase, which could be helping them to better weather current high home prices and bypass elevated mortgage rates that have been blamed for delaying prospective first-time home buyers - not to mention also getting an excellent deal on their new home as prices drop due to higher interest rates.

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Having greater financial resources from the rise in home appreciation may also help explain why older buyers were the least likely age group to say they had to make any sacrifices when they purchased a home. Younger generations, on the other hand, described cutting their spending, delaying vacation plans and even getting a side hustle to afford today's record-high home prices. https://shorturl.at/61FTE