Defined

DEMOGRAPHIC DOSSIER Still, achieving true understanding of this generation is difficult at best. Generation Y is big and elusive, prominent yet mysterious, and diverse but similar in its ideologies, traits, and preferences.

Generation Y is also unabashed in its expectations because it knows its size makes it the future. While marketers enjoying the wealth of the baby boomer generation could afford to ignore the 17 million consumers of the now-passé Generation X, Gen Y is a segment that must be mastered.

For now, they are a demographic cohort defined as those Americans born between 1979 and 1994. They are also known as “echo boomers” or the “millennium generation,” and there are an estimated 60 million to 82 million of them.

Given the size of this group, it is imperative that apartment owners, managers, and developers understand Gen Y well enough to capitalize on the opportunity it presents.

“There are 32 million in the work-force right now and another 10 million coming down the pipe within the next five years,” says Carolyn A. Martin, who serves as a principal for New Haven, Conn.-based RainmakerThinking, which studies the generation.

HIGH-MAINTENANCE, HIGH-PERFORMANCE But Generation Y is a tricky demographic because it is so diverse. After all, even the age group is up for debate. “The definition of Generation Y is a work in progress,” Martin says. “The guys who do the big generation calculations are wondering what a 2-year-old will have in common with a 22-year-old. It might become even smaller.”

Psychologically, Gen Yers are often characterized as high-maintenance—but not in a bad way, Martin says. In these echo boomers, it is a trait that usually leads to high performance.

They may be high-maintenance because they were accustomed to getting their way at home with mom and dad, says William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, a private nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. “In a lot of ways, they are only children,” Frey says. “They don’t have as many brothers and sisters.”

But having fewer siblings sometimes means more parental surveillance. While Gen X is known as “the most-abandoned generation” because it was left at home while parents worked, Martin says, younger baby boomers lived through the materialistic 1980s and are determined to do better for their echo boomer offspring.

“We call them helicopter parents because they are always hovering over their kids,” she says. “They are on the phone with their teachers or going down to HR to talk to the children’s employers.”