BY JON O’CONNELL, STAFF WRITER
Kelly and Adam Marcinek never had much use for homeownership.
They met in college, fell in love, graduated and pumped all their energy into their wedding photography business, One Eleven Images, near Boston, where high home prices nixed the idea of ever buying one.
But now as they shift their priorities toward family — they’ve got a 2-year-old son and another child due in the spring — they’re ready to settle down. And they’re willing to reboot their business in a brand new market to do it.
They’re also part of a wave of young adults buying homes in Northeast Pennsylvania, albeit much later than their parents did.
The generation long chided as late bloomers is finally financing more homes than any other age group.
Realtor.com analyzed mortgage origination data and ranked the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre/Hazleton metro third in the nation for millennial homebuyers.
In the third quarter of 2019, millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) accounted for 55% of new primary home mortgages. That’s up 10% compared to last year.
Last month the Marcineks bought a home on Melrose Avenue in Clarks Summit for $215,000. Both have roots in Northeast Pennsylvania. Kelly’s from Jessup and Adam grew up in Shamokin.
They plan to move later this month.
“As our family has grown, we decided we want to be closer to our family,” Kelly Marcinek said. “In addition, there’s the fact that real estate in the Boston area is outrageous.”
Like the Marcineks, millennials flock to smaller, more affordable markets, Realtor.com found. The average population size in the top 10 metros is about a half-million people. Millennials in those metros also tend to earn more than their peers in other markets, with average household incomes around $67,000, or 7% higher than earnings in that age group for the other 100 metros included in the research.
At 38 years old, Kelly Marcinek said this will be her first home after living in an apartment her whole adult life.
Their story illustrates the top reason millennials are buying homes in Northeast Pennsylvania: homes here just cost less.
“I think (this) year’s going to be better with a lot of them looking to buy,” said Sunita Arora, broker at ERA One Source Realty.
She’s optimistic about a burgeoning job market, and specifically called out two employers she thinks hold promise for drawing younger people to the region.
Online pet supply retailer Chewy promised to bring 1,000 new jobs to the region next year at its distribution center in Archbald, and the booming nonprofit health system Geisinger is spending millions on new facilities in the downtown Scranton area.
Both stand to draw new home hunters on a broad spectrum of economic conditions.
The rental market is stretched thin, Arora said, and a nice rental costs upwards of $1,500 for a young family.
“That’s the same amount someone could pay for a mortgage and buy a house,” she said.
Young home buyers might make up the larger share, but they lack the spending power that their older counterparts enjoy, Realtor.com found using industry statistics provided by the Optimal Blue, a financial market data company.
Nationally, baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) can afford average down payments around 18%. Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) can spend slightly less, around 12%.
Millennials, on the other hand, on average pay only around 9%, which means they’ll spend more time paying down mortgage debt.
Arora, whose own children are millennials, quickly shoulders the blame for latent young buyers.
“It’s also the fact that we, as parents, we didn’t make them as self-sufficient as we should have,” she said. “It’s the truth. We overcompensated.”
While that’s probably true for many millennials, Kelly Marcinek said she and her husband waited for different reasons.
They stayed in the Boston suburbs because they loved the area and wanted to grow their business there.
“We didn’t feel the need to buy a house,” she said. “In the back of our minds, we always thought there was a possibility we’d want to come back, especially after having children.”
Contact the writer: joconnell@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9131; @jon_oc on Twitter