This is part four of a four-part series about how builders are catering to Gen X buyers. Click here for part three.
As common as it is to use generation groups as predictors of buying behavior or other activities, many analysts and industry professionals are critical of the approach for a number of reasons.
Unlike birth years, ages, and income levels, generation classifications are not hard data. Many research studies that classify Americans by their generation group establish exact date ranges for each group, and the U.S. Census fixes the post-war “baby boom” phenomenon between 1946 and 1964. But neither Millennials nor Generation X have a starting or ending date that is widely agreed upon, and the reasons for those starting and ending date ranges can be unclear.
“Generational boundaries are fuzzy, arbitrary and culture-driven,” says Paul Taylor, senior fellow and former executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, in “Generation X: America’s Neglected Middle Child.”
The date ranges covered by the generation groups are also very large – too large, according to Thrive Home Builders’ Stephen Myers, to determine anything specific about the group they cover. This makes it difficult for builders to know exactly what a certain type of demographic will want in a new home.
“Generation groups are almost like a horoscope except that they are for people born within 20 years,” says Myers. “There’s pretty much no generalities to be made about a 20-year group of people.”
This holds especially true for Generation X home buyers, as the current age range of this group–mid-thirties to early fifties–spans almost every segment of the new home market, according to Myers. “Gen X is a huge number. I’ve seen everything from people born from as early as 1961 or perhaps 1964 or 1965, all the way up to ‘81 or even ‘84 by some definitions,” he says. “Some of the buyers on the early end of Gen X may be looking at move-down type product where their kids have left the nest and they’re looking at the next phase of their life. And if you go as far as 1984, you may be talking to people who are buying their homes for the first time.”
Some research bodies, including RENTCafé, sub-divide their millennial categories into “older” and “younger” millennials in order to address this issue. Some also divide Baby Boomers into older and younger groups, calling the younger Boomers born between 1954 and 1964 the “Jones Generation.”
John Burns Real Estate Consulting uses the millennial, Gen X, and baby boomer terminology, but prefers to categorize population groups by the decade in which they were born. This system addresses two of the issues of the generation group system: It categorizes buyers in smaller groups and gives each group a definitive starting and ending date.
For instance, those born in the 1970s – the later end of Generation X – are known to John Burns as 1970s Balancers. “They led a lot of the shift toward moving away from dual incomes to maybe having one parent stay at home, a lot more work-life balance,” says Mikaela Sharp, a John Burns consultant.
On the other hand, the last baby boomers and the earliest Gen-Xers are classified as 1960s Equalers. “They were the first generation where more women graduated from college than men,” Sharp continues.
As for Myers, he believes that the starter-home, move-up, and move-down classifications still have their utility for classifying home buyers and products. “Certainly if you think of the center of Gen X being somewhere in the middle of that 60s and 80s number, you’re talking about the move-up segment,” he says. “So it might be people moving out of their first family home, getting into their second family home. So you’re going to need to do all of those things that they’re looking for.”
At its core, the generation system is made up of assumptions about people as individuals based on the year in which they were born, which does not account for the experiences of individuals or differences in race and class. According to Rebecca Onion, an Ohio-based sociologist and staff writer for Slate, these assumptions can give rise to stereotypes and prejudices.
“Overly schematised and ridiculously reductive, generation theory is a simplistic way of thinking about the relationship between individuals, society, and history,” Onion says in her essay “Against Generations” for Aeon Magazine. “It encourages us to focus on vague ‘generational personalities’, rather than looking at the confusing diversity of social life.”
