There's a lot of money at work right now trying to reinvent the way that homes are bought and sold. Perhaps the most popular trend is "instant buying" or algorithmic home buying. I have been writing about this for years, mostly because of Opendoor. But now there are lots of companies competing in this space. With this model, home sellers get the benefit of an almost immediate sale, though usually it's at a slightly lower price.

Redfin, on the other hand, is returning to something that it first tried out back in 2006: a buy now button on its online listings. It failed back then. But maybe it was simply too early. The feature allows unrepresented buyers -- that is, buyers without an agent -- to make online offers. Naturally, it's far from a single click process. But when accepted, the seller ends up paying about half the amount of commission.

According to the New York Times, the company started testing the feature in late March in the Boston area. Of the 120 homes listed on Redfin with a "start an offer" button, 5 ended up being purchased via an online bid. That's more than I would have expected. But Redfin positions these offers as being the stronger option because they save sellers money. There's also an option to tour the home on your own.

The Urban Institute has a new study out that looks to explain why Millennial homeownership rates are lower than that of previous generations. The typical refrain is that Millennials have a lot more student debt and that the cost of housing in urban centers has risen faster than income levels. But this report tries to put some math behind those explanations. All data is for the US.

Not surprisingly, marriage and kids are significant drivers, and Millennials appear to be delaying both. According to the study, being married increases the probability of owning a home by 18%. If marriage rates in 2015 were the same as they were in 1990 (this is the time period for the study), the Millennial homeownership rate would be 5% higher. Having a kid increases the probability by about 6.2%.

There’s also a widening spread between the homeownership rates for more educated and less educated Millennials. Presumably the distinction is a 4 year university degree. Between 1990 and 2015, the spread between the two groups increased from 3.3% to 9.7%. This was identified as an area of “great concern” because of the possible long term implications.

Combine this phenomenon with the stats that white households have a higher homeownership rate compared to all other racial groups and that having parents who are homeowners increases the likelihood of also owning a home (let’s ignore, for a second, the other intergenerational transfers of wealth), and you have a recipe for rising wealth disparities.

Of course, some of you will undoubtedly argue that in this part of the world we are overly fixated on homeownership as a mechanism for wealth creation. I mean, there are many examples of very wealthy countries with homeownership rates that are far less than what they are here in Canada and the US. But that’s a discussion for a different blog post.

If you’d like to go through the full Millennial Homeownership report, you can do that here.

There's a lot of money at work right now trying to reinvent the way that homes are bought and sold. Perhaps the most popular trend is "instant buying" or algorithmic home buying. I have been writing about this for years, mostly because of Opendoor. But now there are lots of companies competing in this space. With this model, home sellers get the benefit of an almost immediate sale, though usually it's at a slightly lower price.

Redfin, on the other hand, is returning to something that it first tried out back in 2006: a buy now button on its online listings. It failed back then. But maybe it was simply too early. The feature allows unrepresented buyers -- that is, buyers without an agent -- to make online offers. Naturally, it's far from a single click process. But when accepted, the seller ends up paying about half the amount of commission.

According to the New York Times, the company started testing the feature in late March in the Boston area. Of the 120 homes listed on Redfin with a "start an offer" button, 5 ended up being purchased via an online bid. That's more than I would have expected. But Redfin positions these offers as being the stronger option because they save sellers money. There's also an option to tour the home on your own.

The Urban Institute has a new study out that looks to explain why Millennial homeownership rates are lower than that of previous generations. The typical refrain is that Millennials have a lot more student debt and that the cost of housing in urban centers has risen faster than income levels. But this report tries to put some math behind those explanations. All data is for the US.

Not surprisingly, marriage and kids are significant drivers, and Millennials appear to be delaying both. According to the study, being married increases the probability of owning a home by 18%. If marriage rates in 2015 were the same as they were in 1990 (this is the time period for the study), the Millennial homeownership rate would be 5% higher. Having a kid increases the probability by about 6.2%.

There’s also a widening spread between the homeownership rates for more educated and less educated Millennials. Presumably the distinction is a 4 year university degree. Between 1990 and 2015, the spread between the two groups increased from 3.3% to 9.7%. This was identified as an area of “great concern” because of the possible long term implications.

Combine this phenomenon with the stats that white households have a higher homeownership rate compared to all other racial groups and that having parents who are homeowners increases the likelihood of also owning a home (let’s ignore, for a second, the other intergenerational transfers of wealth), and you have a recipe for rising wealth disparities.

Of course, some of you will undoubtedly argue that in this part of the world we are overly fixated on homeownership as a mechanism for wealth creation. I mean, there are many examples of very wealthy countries with homeownership rates that are far less than what they are here in Canada and the US. But that’s a discussion for a different blog post.

If you’d like to go through the full Millennial Homeownership report, you can do that here.