As we kick off the new year, it’s a great time to talk about new audiences.

Red Propeller partners Jim Goldberg and Derek Lunde recently led a ULI Northwest Multifamily Product Council discussion about the youngest emerging multifamily audiences – not just Gen Z, which is starting to hit the rental market, but also Gen A/Alpha, which will be starting to rent within the next decade.

Without rehashing our entire presentation, here are some highlights:

• These generations are the most diverse yet, with minorities accounting for half of Gen Z and 52% of Gen A.
• In the Seattle area (and less so nationwide), this includes a significant foreign-born population, largely from Asia and highly educated (accounting for all ages but certainly applicable to/expected of Gen Z and Gen A).
• Gen Z is comparable in size to Millennials.
• Gen Z is always connected, educated, focused on inclusion, equity, and sustainability, pragmatic, generally focused on more on smaller, more intimate friend groups, more likely to spend some time living with parents as adults, and more likely to delay marriage and/or children.
• Gen A currently includes more than 59 million Americans (nearly 18% of the population).
• They are even more embedded in the digital world, can be expected to be at least as highly educated as Gen Z, are more likely than previous generations to have grown up in single-parent households, and may have experienced significant impacts from the Covid pandemic.

Gen Z apartment Mad Libs

As a fun way to help our audience understand Gen Z and Gen A, or at least grasp how little they understood these generations, we led participants in a Gen Z Mad Lib and Gen A vocab quiz (know what “rizzler,” “skibidi,” and “sigma” mean?).

What’s the point of all this?

It all goes back to one of our core beliefs: to maximize value, we believe it’s better to be perfect for a targeted group of renters than to be just OK for the masses. For projects in many locations, that now means understanding the distinctive characteristics of Gen Z (and local nuances). Within the next decade, it will mean factoring in Gen A.

Of course, we have some thoughts about how to do that, and we’d be happy to chat!

Big thanks to ULI Northwest Multifamily Product Council Co-Chairs Amanda Keating and Derek Bottles. It was super fun working with both of them.