This NC suburb is among the top places millennials are buying homes in US, study says
A North Carolina suburb seems to be popular among millennial homeowners, a recent report found.
The study, done by Smartasset, used data from the U.S. Census Bureau to find the top municipalities in the country where millennials are buying homes.
Cary ranked in the top 15, coming in at No. 11, the report found.
The report used data from 200 of the country’s largest cities and considered millennials those ages 35 and younger.
Pew Research Center says millennials are those born between 1981 and 1996, meaning the oldest of the generation were 38 years old in 2019 and the youngest were 23.
The Smartasset report used two metrics to rank the cities it examined.
The first was the 2018 millennial homeownership rate, which is the “percentage of millennial households who own their homes,” the 2020 report says.
The other was the percentage in homeownership change among those ages 18 to 34 between 2009 and 2018, the report says.
Researchers then averaged each city’s rankings in the two categories and used that number to determine the final score, the report says.
Cary’s millennial homeownership rate in 2018 was 36.74 percent, which is a 1.55 percent increase from 2009, the report found. That earned the Raleigh suburb a score of 87.19, tying it for No. 11 along with Chandler, Arizona.
Cary was one of 48 areas where the millennial homeownership rate increased over the last 10 years.
In 152 of the 200 cities studied, the rate decreased, the report says. It’s also decreased nationally by about 3 percent over the last 10 years.
The homeownership rate in Cary is higher than the national rate of 33.7 percent, the report says. But that rate is lower than the national homeownership average of 64 percent.
The place that came out on top was Gilbert, Arizona, which had a 56.56 percent millennial homeownership rate and a 9.17 percent increase from 2009, the report found.
Seven of the top 10 cities were in the West, the report found.
Cary was the only municipality in North Carolina to make the report’s top 48 list.
