Many people start thinking about a home purchase well in advance of actually engaging in the process of finding a home. In a national poll in the first quarter of 2019, 13% of adults reported planning a home purchase within the next year.  Of those prospective buyers, 46% are already actively involved in trying to find a home to buy.  The latter finding is not different from a year earlier, when 17% of poll participants were planning a home purchase and 46% of them were actively engaged in the search process.

Senior (56%) and Millennial (50%) buyers are the most likely to have moved beyond just planning to actually start the search process, compared to 41% of Boomers. Geographically, 53% of prospective buyers in the Northeast are actively engaged, compared to 42% in the Midwest. The findings come from NAHB’s Housing Trends Report (HTR) for the first quarter of 2019.

Are actively engaged buyers spending a lot of time house hunting? In the first quarter of 2019, 53% of those searching have been at it for three months or longer, while 46% have looked for less than three months.  A year earlier, 50% of active buyers reported looking for a home for less than three months.   Future polls will determine if there is a trend for more people spending upwards of three months searching for a home.

Source – Eye on Housing