Down payments

Google avocado-toast restaurants, squeeze into some skinny jeans and be prepared to embrace any number of other cliches about millennials, home real estate pros. They're going to be your prime customers in 2019.

More than one-third of millennials said saving for a down payment is the biggest hurdle to buying a house, but few seem to realize they don't need to put 20% down to get a mortgage, a recent survey found.

The standards for mortgage lending constrained in December, as a drop in conventional credit brought availability to its lowest point since February 2017, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

First-time homebuyers earn $30,000 more than their peers who didn't buy a house, and nearly $12,000 more than the country's overall median household income, highlighting affordability issues in current housing conditions, according to Zillow.

Cash-strapped lenders need to find a way to consistently fund marketing that resonates with more cultures if they really want to be able to replace lost volume by reaching underserved borrowers.

From Ohio to Utah, here's a look at the 12 housing markets with the highest percentage of millennial purchasers.

Rising rents combined with growing housing inventory could lead to increased purchase mortgage originations in the near future.

Putting down 20% of the sales price has been the industry standard when buying a house, but less than half of consumers do that much, according to Zillow.

Intense competition among homebuyers remains as shown by the continual growth of median down payments, according to Attom Data Solutions.

It's in lenders' best interests to show first-time homebuyers how to avoid overextending themselves, which is easy to do in a housing market short on inventory and long on big down payments, the CEO of Freedom Mortgage says.