This week's freshest signal for your marketing isn't a rate move — it's who's actually buying. New ICE data shows Gen Z's share of purchase rate locks just hit a record high, with Gen Z and millennial buyers now accounting for roughly two-thirds of all purchase volume. Call it what it is: a generational handoff. If your current marketing still talks like it's aimed at a 45-year-old move-up buyer, you're increasingly talking past the buyer who's actually in the market.
The rate backdrop stays mostly unchanged for this audience — the 30-year sits at 6.54%, mid-pack in its 90-day range of 6.23% to 6.70% — and unlike a refi client protecting a lower rate, a first-time or younger purchase buyer isn't waiting on a number to drop before they act. Affordability, not the headline rate, is what's actually moving them: Zillow's June data showed existing home sales up nearly 6% year over year as modest affordability gains brought buyers back off the sidelines. That's the real opening — buyers who were priced out are testing the market again, and a meaningful chunk of them are the Gen Z/millennial cohort ICE just flagged.
The tactical shift: build content that speaks to how this buyer actually shops, not how your last decade of marketing assumed they would. That means short vertical video over long-form posts, plain payment math over rate jargon, and down-payment-assistance and first-time-buyer program awareness front and center — this cohort overwhelmingly hasn't heard of the programs that could shave real money off their purchase. A single short-form video walking through what a first-time-buyer program actually saves someone will outperform a static rate-update graphic with this audience nearly every time.
film one 30-45 second vertical video explaining a first-time-buyer or down-payment-assistance program available in your market, in plain language, and post it to the platform where you're actually reaching buyers under 30 — not just the one you're most comfortable using.