BMSA Bulletin May 2019

Everyone knows what's ailing housing. Inflated home prices, overly tight credit, sky-high school debt - a host of factors have contributed to declining affordability, and that shut the door on homeownership to the Millennial generation just as it began to enter its prime home-buying years.

Every year, surveys from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) illustrated the results. First-timers as a percentage of all home buyers fell from the low 40s during the last boom to the low 30s after the Great Recession, and never bounced back.

One catch:  A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York says NAR's data is wrong. Working from a sampling of U.S. households much larger than NAR's, the New York Fed found that from 2000 through 2016, first-time buyers accounted for a minimum of 40% and as much as 51% of all home purchases. First-timers averaged 44% to 45% throughout the 17-year period, and made up 46% of the total in 2017.

Moreover, Millennials have been pulling their weight and then some. The oldest turned 25 (typically the minimum age when people buy their first home) around 2007. Since then, the median age of a first-time buyer has fallen from 37.2 to 35.4.

Training Rule

The Minimum Training Requirements for Entry-Level Commercial Motor Vehicle Operators will enact new federal requirements in an attempt to standardize today's existing patchwork of training curricula that are developed at the state level. The final rule puts the onus on commercial driver's license (CDL) schools, as well as carriers with in-house CDL training programs, to self-certify in a yet-to-be-deployed Training Provider Registry (TRP) and to overhaul entry-level driver training courses. Currently, the U.S. Department of Transportation only mandates four topics for CDL training providers: hours of service, driver qualification and disqualification, health and wellness, and whistleblower protection. The new rule will require schools and trainers to provide 31 specific theory courses, as well as 19 behind-the-wheel (BTW) skills courses, and driver candidates are required to have an 80% pass rate. The entry-level driver training final rule, which takes effect on Feb. 7, 2020, also establishes new minimum standards for both theory instructors and BTW instructors. Some caution that schools providing CDL training may be unwilling or unable to meet the new requirements, which could exacerbate the driver shortage faced by the industry.