This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of CORT.
You may remember we have partnered with CORT in the past on making a guest room work anywhere at home and finishing rooms off for the holidays. Recently, I read this interesting article they posted discussing the trend of Millennials on home purchasing. It perked my attention – I feel like I an constantly hearing about this trend – that the generation I am a part of isn’t interested in home buying in the traditional sense. I’ve found this fact to be odd since buying a home is really the only way to make it unique and totally your own (a definite priority of my generation).
The article talks about a few reasons why this ever so popular millennials-don’t-buy-homes fact might not actually be fact at all, but just a myth.
They state that millennials are in fact purchasing homes, just a couple years later than past generations – which totally makes sense since we all know seeing the world is a much higher priority. ;) And that a huge upswing in the research is taking into account only major cities where it is VERY hard sometimes for a 20something to purchase a home, so in these situations, more of our generation feels okay about renting instead.
Since our current house is the 3rd home Matt and I have owned, and we’ve also rented quite a few in the middle of that all – I thought it would be fun to take a quick trip down memory lane and talk about a few of our own home ownership experiences along the way.
1. Our first home
I know this is probably going to sound crazy if you were not a part of the west coast housing bubble of the early two thousands, but the first house we owned we never actually even stepped foot in! We purchased a new-build house in Las Vegas just as the market was sky rocketing. Since the house was a new build it took nearly 9 months from when we signed the papers to when the home became move in ready. We picked our all the colors and cabinets, it was a very fun process. BUT, in the meantime, we had a job transition and moved to Seattle – so we signed the papers to close on this house and the very same day put it on the market. It was bittersweet, but also a great financial investment for our new life as a married couple.
2. Our second home
After renting an adorable condo in Seattle we moved back to Las Vegas and over the course of a couple of years and an experience with IVF ended up pregnant with twins! This is when we bought our 2nd home, a small track house that was VERY beige and VERY boring. If you’ve never lived in a southwest track home neighborhood, I can’t even explain how wildly horribly boring they can be.
However, boring be damned! We had great plans for the space and it was our first trial at stepping our toes into renovating a home. Matt pulled out the carpet and laid floors for the first time ever and we updated a lot of the paint and lighting in the house. At the time, it felt like a complete overhaul to us and made for a space that reflected our growing family. This house hit the backend of that crazy housing market and we ended up losing the housing game and a ton of money along with it.
3. Our third and current home
Fast forward nearly 5 years of renting after this in San Diego and in Reno and we bought our current home in 2016. Many of you have been following our room by room renovation of this space. Although we don’t know the future, it is a house we could imagine ourselves living in for a long time to come.
All this thought about the homes we’ve owned over the years made me smile at how much we’ve grown in our design style and taste. The above photo was from our first apartment where I basically cut out a photo from a 2003 Pottery Barn magazine and painted my heart out until my dining room looked the same. Ha! The crazy things we did in our younger age.
It has also gotten me thinking about how finding our current home, renovating it and now focusing on paying it off will in fact give us one day the freedom to travel and do all the millennial type things we supposedly are missing out on by purchasing a home. In the long run, I’ve come to believe that the more traditional nature of a home purchase is exactly what sets us up for living the life Matt and I want to live. How about you? Have you purchased a home? Do you see this trend as compelling amongst the 20-30something generations.
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