Do Young, Tech-Savvy Buyers
Need a Real Estate Agent's Help?

Here's a look at what's new in real-estate markets across the U.S. from around the Web. (Some links may require registration or subscriptions.)

The generation gap in real estate

In real estate, there is a growing dichotomy: buyers are getting younger, while real estate agents are growing older, according to articles in the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Boston Globe.

Using data from the National Association of Realtors, these articles note that while the median age of home buyers was 39 in 2007, the median age among Realtors is 51. And, among first-time home buyers, 49% were between 25 and 34 years old.

This could present a real problem for the real-estate industry, which despite the current overload of real-estate professionals, is actively trying to recruit younger real-estate agents, reports Aubrey Cohen of the Post-Intelligencer. Younger agents will be needed to replace an aging workforce and to create inroads with a uniquely high-tech set of house hunters, the articles say. Youthful home buyers are more independent and rely more on the Internet in the home-buying process than their predecessors did, these articles note.

As one reader pointed out in response to a WSJ.com post on photos in real-estate listings, "most agents are not utilizing technology efficiently." The readers explains, "We had a young agent and he did an excellent job with marketing our town home. We ended up getting three dozen offers. He also uses BlackBerry and a few other tech gadgets which many agents simply don't use or cannot afford or whatever."

The Globe points out that Gen X and Gen Y buyers don't want the hand-holding of the typical agent/home-buyer relationship. Many of these consumers prefer to do their own house hunting and research online, and some are skipping buyer agents all together to complete the entire home search and home purchase on their own.

To be sure, not all young agents are going to be more tech-savvy and many members of Gen X and Gen Y will still want some hand-holding in the home-buying process.

Home ownership as "indentured servitude"

In the U.S., homeownership generally has been viewed as a good thing -- a "forced savings program" for consumers and a boon to communities as residents invest in their own neighborhoods, but now, post boom, owning a home has become something more akin to "indentured servitude," writes columnist James Surowiecki in the New Yorker.

Our homes are not making us richer -- thanks to the "cheap credit and lax lending standards" of the past few years, about 15 million homeowners "now owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth," Mr. Surowiecki says. To top it off, instead of building equity in our homes, many of us have borrowed against our properties' worth. Home-equity loans totaled more than $6 billion between 2004 and 2005 -- meaning that our homes are no longer piggy banks building up future wealth, they're piggy banks to tap into for our own personal consumption, he writes.

Also, the recent rise in homeownership may work against our economy's recovery from its current downturn, says Mr. Surowiecki, who notes that the percentage of Americans who own their own homes increased nearly 10% between 1994 and 2005. A rise in homeownership is a bad thing for the economy because it encourages people to stay in one place, instead of moving to where the jobs are, he says, nothing that states with the highest unemployment rates -- places like Alabama, Michigan and Mississippi -- also have some of the highest homeownership rates.

Self-storage units become second homes

As American houses become crammed with more and more stuff, homeowners are buying and selling self-storage units like homes. Units are now being outfitted with extras like cable TV, clubhouses and high-speed Internet and can reach 2,000 square feet, writes Kristina Shevory for the New York Times.

For instance, one person profiled by the Times owns two units valued at $119,000 in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, and uses one as a "home office" and the other as a place to play games with his children, Ms. Shevory writes. Another owner, in Spokane Valley, Wash., uses his space to keep a gallery of artwork by Northwestern artists and plans to invite other unit owners to view his collection, Ms. Shevory says.

She notes that storage units that can be bought and sold (most storage units are rentals) tend to be located in vacation-home locales or in cold climates where people have a lot of winter gear to store, and that units can cost anywhere from $57,000 to $200,000. For the units, owners have deeds and must pay property taxes, utility bills and monthly homeowner fees, she says.

Ms. Kim is a senior editor at RealEstateJournal.com.

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