Wealthy Millennials See Condos on Instagram, Feel Cool, Spend Millions

Bucking the recent conventional wisdom that millennials are holding off on buying homes due to a fear of getting into further debt, the Wall Street Journal has an article today about the way the wealthy among the generation is jumping into the housing market feet first. One broker told the Journal:

“In the last two months, half the folks I sold homes to were young entrepreneurial types—and they were all buying homes for over a million dollars. A few years ago, that kind of buyer was invisible. We had young folks buying starter condos for a few hundred thousand dollars. But this new wave is skipping that step entirely and going right for the high-end home.”

Naturally, San Francisco’s tech sector is making much of this happen because they have money but they want more than stocks in their portfolio, and real estate is looking pretty sweet again. Brokers are answering the techies’ call in a language they can understand–not just in San Francisco, but everywhere, using “new” tactics:

…the marketing team turned to social media to promote the building, running renderings of units through filters on Instagram, the photo-sharing site. …

“The fact that the building was all over Instagram, that definitely made me feel like it was new and chic,” says Joseph Hanono, a 29-year-old who runs his own insurance company and is in contract to purchase a 600-square-foot unit in the building for close to $1 million. “I feel like my neighbors there are going to be the kind of people I want to be neighbors with…”

No Instagram upskirts, Joseph, or your neighbors won’t want to be friends with you.

The Rise of the Young Buyer [WSJ]