Shift in buyers' demographics for Real Estate

The idea of owning one’s own house is ingrained in Indian psyche, very early on in their lives. Over the years there have been shifts in the nature and age groups of buyers primarily buying/investing in Real Estate.

According to a reliable survey, there has been a major shift in the age demographic of Indians looking to buy homes over the past two decades. It revealed that in the 1990s, the majority chunk of homebuyers was between age 45-55 years, but by 2000s the age bracket dropped to include the age group of 35-45. While in 2009-10s, due to easy availability of home loans the share of homebuyers falling in the age bracket from 25-35 years increased.

However, in 2019, before the world was hit with COVID-19, a lot of surveys & reports suggested that, the younger millennials were reconsidering the decision of buying a house as they are reluctant to take on a huge EMI burden early on in their careers. Also, there was resistance amongst the youth to settle in one specific place as the demands of the modern-day careers keep people on the move.

But things slowly started to change for the millennials, who started to shift towards the idea of owning a house due to the pandemic. One of the major contributors towards this shift was the new Work from Home model which drastically reduced the need for city-hopping for jobs. But as the world has slowly adapted to live with COVID-19, the offices around the globe have slowly started opening up to a hybrid or a full time working from office model, forcing people to move out of their hometowns and go back to the cities of their workplace.

It will be interesting to see where the consumer sentiment will go next in the future.