Whether it’s thanks to the Coutts account of mum and dad or homemade fortunes from IT whizzery, some of today’s wealthiest buyers are also some of the youngest.
Welcome to the millionaire millennials, whose collective spending power in the US alone is $600billion a year, set to rise to $1.4 trillion by 2020, according to the accounting firm Accenture. Naturally every property developer and agent wants a piece of that pie – and since being creative is part of the millennial DNA, they are having to come up with some inventive ways to get Generation Y on side.
No one under 30 trawls through agents’ websites to find a property, but they do identify with Instagram. “This is where millennials are getting inspiration and, best of all, social media channels allow things to trend and go viral,” says Magnum Real Estate’s president Ben Shaoul, who is using Instagram to market his developments 196 Orchard in the Lower East Side, with apartments from $1.075m-$4.495m, and CODA in the Gramercy district, where prices range from $1.1m-$2.2m.
High-spending 20-somethings are a similarly sought after tribe in London. CBRE took a look recently at just who these millennials are, surveying 13,000 globally, including 1,000 in the UK. This is a generation who spend half their disposable income on leisure, won’t conceive of a commute of more than 30 minutes and want instant gratification. They’re happy to rent everything, from clothes to computers, but they want it now.
One answer might be to give them all Fidget Spinners and tell them to calm down. Otherwise, you could go down the route of Embassy Gardens in Nine Elms, which is millennial central with an events programme that includes Friday night gigs, film clubs and pop-up food events, and facilities including a yoga room, summer bar and the iconic-before-it’s-even-built Sky Pool, with surrounding apartments on sale from £1m.