John Funge, 26, spent an entire Sunday analyzing his finances and all sorts of investment options before he decided to buy a townhouse in Ballston in April.
"I wanted to make sure a house was a really solid investment," said Funge, who now rents out part of his three- bedroom home as part of his investment strategy to get money back faster.
Suzanne Duryea, 31, and her husband, Tim Waldmann, 32, scoured the Internet for school data before they bought their Silver Spring home this summer. With their 23-month-old daughter in mind, they also had their home tested for radon and lead--even testing the water before they agreed to buy it.
Karen Creedon, 31, used to get laughed at by real estate agents when she told them she wanted to buy a single-family home in North Arlington, near a Metro station, for about $150,000.
But Creedon persisted, spending at least eight weekends driving around until she found the house she wanted. When she thought the price was too high at $159,000, she waited another two months before buying the house for $149,000 in June.
"If you want something bad enough, you go for it," Creedon said with smug satisfaction as she sat in the house she moved to in August.
Financially conservative, computer-minded, environmentally conscious and above all determined, Funge, Duryea and Creedon represent the home buyers of Generation X, as the group of 20- to 32-year-olds are now called.
Just coming into their prime buying years, Xers approach the home-buying process far differently than their predecessors, the baby boomers, who range in age from 33 to 51, real estate officials report.
Compared with their older counterparts, the Xers have been a little slower to enter the real estate market. The average age of the first-time home buyer is now 32, compared with age 29 just 10 years ago... Thanks to the Internet, "by the time Xers come to us, they've already done their research on how to buy a house," said Stephen Israel, president of Buyer's Edge, a buyer-only brokerage firm based in Bethesda.
"As a group, they do more research than anybody else," he said. "A great many of them take the time to do their master plan reviews, go to their local park and planning departments and study all the maps related to existing and future road improvements, changes in utilities, etc."
"I don't think we have had any single or married Xer not do a radon or lead test; a lot of older buyers are much less concerned about radon and lead."
In some ways, the younger buyers have the same demands and criteria as older ones, Israel said. "People with kids are still as concerned about schools as older people. But what's interesting is how plugged in they are to that issue through the Internet..."
