How to Create New HomeOwners

Every year the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University publishes a study on The State of the Nation’s Housing. A friend of mine once encouraged me to read it and he was right that it’s a must read.

This year’s study was recently released. It covers broad areas such as housing and rental markets, homeownership rates, new construction and housing challenges. And it talks about demographic drivers and their impact on housing. This is good stuff.

As I read through the document I found three major takeaways.

• Household mobility, or the share of households that move in a given year, has hit new lows. Only 13% of US households moved in 2011. And the vast majority of the households that move are young adults and renters. When looking at the percentages of current home owners that change residences, mobility rates fell from over 7% in 2007 to under 5% in 2011.  People are staying in their homes longer – possibly due to lack of equity. So how are you reaching out to young adults and apartment dwellers about home ownership? And how are you working to make sure that when one of your existing mortgage holders moves, that smaller group comes back to the Credit Union for their next purchase loan?