Millennials Are Old News

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LOS ANGELES—Millennials may be driving the market today, but we should be starting to think about Generation Z, the next generation that spans from 1998 to 2015. Gen Z has 72.6 million people. The oldest in the generation are about to enter college and by 2025, they will make up 16% of the workforce. Meet the next generation to change the way we think about real estate.

“Generation Z has a deeper adoption of technology and a more immersive understanding of technology,” William Robertson, senior managing director of program management at Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, tells GlobeSt.com. “The younger generation is the first generation to be born with immersive technology from day one. This generation has an expectation that media and communication will be instant and that content will be 'rented.' They expect to be able to access any piece of information at any time, and they want to be able to do it quickly. This is a trend that we have been seeing with each successive generation.”

Newmark Grubb Knight Frank put together a chart, below, to identify the cultural markers of this new generation and the cultural events that shape who they are. Gen Z is the first generation to have the Internet and smart technology from birth, and as a result they interact with technology and communication differently than millennials. “If you walk into a Gen Z room, they are on headphones listening to music with a phone, computer and tablet,” Josef Farrar, executive managing director at NGKF, tells GlobeSt.com. “So, workplace needs to be technologically advanced to accommodate that. A lot of companies haven't addressed those issues because they don't understand those issues.” According to the firm's research, this makes Gen Z talented multi-taskers and great researchers.

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Technology is still an important trademark of the millennial generation; however, Gen z uses technology even more fluidly and as a means of content creation rather than content consumption. Robertson, though, says that technology is narrowing the generational gap. “I think it is narrowing because the cost of technology is significantly less than it was even five years ago. To change the technology in your office to match the technology in your pocket is much less expensive than it used to be. Companies have been forced to adopt and adapt,” he says, using the example of company-mandated blackberries a few years ago. That quickly changed when mass employees wanted to use iphones.

Generation Z will, of course, expect different office and residential environments than millennials, often expecting high-tech environments everywhere they go. In the second part to his piece, GlobeSt.com will cover how office environments may change for Gen Z.