Home Depot, America’s largest home improvement store, served 424,000 first-time homebuyers in the second quarter of 2017 — the most since 2005, and an 11% increase from a year ago. Millennials made up 38% of the buyers.
The percentage of millennial home owners also increased year over year, from 34.1% to 35.3%.
As Carol Tome, Home Depot’s chief financial officer, told analysts during the company’s quarterly earnings call in August:
We anticipated this happening with millennials coming into an age where they start to form families, children, or pets or whatever their family unit might look like. They’re moving into homes, which bodes very well for us and… extends the recovery.
Susan Maklari and Christie Fredericks, analysts at Credit Suisse, added in a note following the call that Ms. Tome’s remarks were “consistent with our view that pent up entry-level demand along with moderately increasing supply should provide for housing expansion over the next several years.”
[Continue to the full Business Insider article (August 2017).]
Home Depot’s third-quarter results, released about a week ago, showed even stronger growth, with a mammoth 8% increase in sales and revenue, year over year. Some of this is attributable to what Home Depot CEO Craig Menear called “an unprecedented number of natural disasters,” leading to an increased need for new housing supplies. However, a November 14 TheStreet article reaffirmed Business Insider‘s report from August.
Ms. Tome told TheStreet after the second quarter earnings results:
[Continue to the full TheStreet article (November 2017).]Homes are being bought by millennials. It’s what we thought would happen. People were saying millennials would never buy a home. Yet, we had the research on it and thought it would happen.
