33 Must-Know Stats about Modern Real Estate Customers

Matthew Ferrara
Published: 02/12/2012
Posted by: RET Staff

Let's talk real estate consumers, not houses, for a moment. If you want your sales, marketing and customer-relationship strategy to be as effective as possible, make sure you've understood just who you're trying to connect with this year. In fact, of the top 10 reasons people bought a home last year, most were "personal" reasons. So stop spending as much time worrying about housing inventory and make sure you have mastered the research about the housing consumer. Here are some to get you started, courtesy of multiple sources, including the National Association of REALTORS, Pew Research, Nielsen, Morgan-Stanley and a few other pieces we've brought together.

Buyers:

• 37% of recent buyers were "first time" buyers – a drop from 50% in 2010
• They typical buyer was 45 years old – up from 39 a year ago
• 37% of buyers were under the age of 31; 32% were over 55
• While all buyers use the internet to search for homes, for 35% of them, it was the first step in the process; 21% started by contacting an agent
• 21% of buyers were single females; 12% single males
• 64% of all buyers had no children under 18 at home
• Buyers found real estate agents (83%) slightly more useful than the internet (81%)
• 92% said open houses were very- to somewhat-useful sources of real estate information
• Buyers found the home they purchased in the newspaper 5% of the time
• 58% of buyers wanted to see videos when looking at property online