Millennials are buying homes with friends

5/17/24 12:41PM

Rearrangements

Home Alone and Friends are 2 of the most iconic pieces of Millennial media... they're also increasingly how the generation is thinking about homeownership. Indeed, 42% of the age group report purchasing a house by themselves, and some 14% have buddied up to buy a place, according to a new survey from financial services company Bankrate.

While buying as a couple is still the method that most Millennials reported (47% said they’d purchased with a partner/spouse), the route to homeownership has been more varied for the generation — especially when compared to Gen X and Baby Boomers. Even though respondents were allowed to select multiple responses, just 1% of Baby Boomers said they’d ever bought a place with a friend or a group of friends, and just 4% of Gen X said the same.

Bought in the USA?

Although discourse around Millennial struggles to get a place of their own has buzzed through the media and around family dinner tables for years — the oldest Millennials would have turned 40 roughly 3 years ago now — the age group did hit a significant housing milestone in 2022 when, for the first time in history, the majority (52%) owned their homes.

With a few key issues having beleaguered their home-owning aspirations, not least the fact that they’re all looking to buy at the same time, it’s little wonder that Millennials have been more open to exploring different options to get a foot on the property ladder, even if it increasingly means sharing a bathroom with their brother or bestie.

Millie Giles5/8/26

Ahead of Mother’s Day, Google searches for “same day flower delivery” have ticked up a little earlier this year

If you’ve already made plans for a Mother’s Day gift in advance of this Sunday, congratulations. But if alarm bells are suddenly ringing, consider this a gentle reminder that, like a sizable share of the US population this time of year often does, you can still scrape together some last-minute flowers for the woman who carried you for nine months.

Data from Google Trends reveals that searches for “same day flower delivery” spike in the US in May every year, when Mother’s Day takes place. As we noted last February, the same query also gains traction around Valentine’s Day.

This year, however, it appears that searches for last-minute flowers have remained elevated in the last two months after the usual peak in February — with the search interest this April actually exceeding that seen around Cupid’s Day.

Honestly, we’re not sure why searches are spiking a little early. One explanation might be that Passover and Easter have overlapped at the start of April, and Americans wanted to celebrate with some flowers. Maybe it’s a host of Claude bots that are now running errands for AI-obsessed execs — or perhaps Americans are just impulse-buying some seasonal spring blooms after an unusually warm March, without a particular occasion.