By Scott Morgan
California, Texas, and Colorado are luring millennial buyers, who seek areas with solid job growth and affordable (for the area) housing markets, according to a new report by Realtor.com [1]. Seven of the top 10 hottest ZIP codes for millennial migration are in these three states, with the Fort Worth suburb of Watauga leading the pack.
Realtor.com ranked the hottest ZIP codes [2] for this year, placing Watauga’s 76148 at the top. The report called Watauga “a youthful and relatively dense suburban community [where] residents have easy access to a great restaurant and craft brewery scene, cultural offerings like the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth‒‒plus two football powerhouses, the Dallas Cowboys and Texas Christian University, less than 20 miles away.”
The dominant buyer segment in Watauga, according to Realtor.com, is millennials. Those between the ages of 25 and 34 years old and account for a third of all mortgages in the market, and, including those already in place, millennials up two thirds of the total population of owners in the area.
“Twenty-one percent of millennial households make over six figures,” the report stated. Homes sell fats in Watauga and job growth is steady. Collectively, it stated, “the top 10 hottest ZIPs are seeing average job growth of 2.3 percent this year, which is 35 percent stronger than the national rate”
Close behind was Pleasant Hill, Calif., an outlier of San Francisco, where millennials are also the dominant homeowner population. Similar numbers for income, millennial population, and job growth filled out the remainder of the top 10. Those cities were: Northglenn, and Colorado Springs, Colo.; San Antonio; Petaluma; Melrose, Mass; Crestwood, Mo.; Milwaukie, Ore.; and North Park, Calif.
“Homes for sale in this year’s hottest ZIP codes are selling almost as quickly as they hit the market,” said Jonathan Smoke, chief economist for Realtor.com. “While millennials are usually a significant presence in most markets, their sheer size and buying power have made them a force to be reckoned with in these hot ZIP codes and given them the power to shift supply and demand dynamics.”