Salt Lake City is the hottest housing market for Millennials, with people under age 35 accounting for more than half (51 percent) of the region's total home purchase requests, according to a new report.

Minneapolis and Pittsburgh tied for second place, with 48 percent of home purchase requests coming from Millennials, according to a LendingTree analysis of 2018 mortgage requests in America's 50 largest metropolitan areas.

Researchers said Millennials are increasingly entering the housing market as they are getting older, and they are looking to buy in smaller markets away from the more expensive major cities like Los Angeles and New York.

'A big part of it is affordability,' LendingTree Chief Economist Tendayi Kapfidze told DailyMail.com. LendingTree is an online loan marketplace.

This map illustrates the top 10 cities in America for Millennials seeking to buy a home, where the highest proportion of people under age 35 are making home purchase requests

That's good news for the real estate markets like Buffalo New York, where 46 percent of prospective buyers are Millennials.

Denver, St. Louis and Kansas City tied for fourth place at 45 percent, followed by Columbus, Ohio and Rochester, N.Y. (44 percent each).

It's critical for the overall housing market's continuing recovery to have younger people become homeowners, Kapfidze said.

Millennials face unique challenges to homeownership - including the fact that many entered the job market at the height of the Great Recession of 2008 and struggled to find good-paying jobs at ages when Americans have historically been able to start accumulating wealth, he said.

In addition, many remain saddled with student debt that makes it tougher to save for a down payment on a home.

'Millennials have less net worth than previous generations at the same age, and that's a confluence of the slower wage growth we've seen, but a big part of it is also student debt,' Kapfidze said.

'They are participating (in the real estate market), just not at the rates of prior generations because of some of these special factors,' he added.

Millennials made the least home purchase requests in Tampa, Florida; Las Vegas and Miami – where only about 30 percent of prospective buyers were younger than 35.

The cities with the youngest average buyers were Salt Lake City; Louisville, Kentucky and Cincinnati – where the average age for potential Millennial homebuyers is roughly 28 years old.

Louisville and Cincinnati have average down payment requirements that are lower than the national average – meaning Millennials don't have to save as long as they do in other places to be able to afford a home.

This map illustrates the bottom 10 cities in America for Millennials seeking to buy a home, where the lowest proportion of people under age 35 are making home purchase requests

While the average down payment in Salt Lake City is higher than the national average, it has a lower average age among the total population – a factor contributing to the lower average age of prospective homebuyers.

In addition, Salt Lake City is in Utah – the state with the youngest newly married couples in the country, according to U.S. Census data. The state also has a lower than average median age for marriage: 26 for men and 24 for women, compared to the national median of 29 for men and 27 for women.

Those factors could explain why Salt Lake City is such a popular market for Americans under age 35 – life events such as marriage and child birth tend to motivate people to pursue first-time homeownership.

Meanwhile, Millennials wait the longest to buy homes in San Francisco; San Jose, California; and New York City. The average age of Millennial buyers in those cities was 29.6 years old.

Millennials in those cities also had the highest average credit ratings – all averaging above 704, significantly higher than the average of 656 across the nation's 50 largest metropolitan areas.

Meanwhile, Millennials with the lowest average credit scores live in Memphis, Tennessee; Birmingham, Alabama and New Orleans – coming in at 622, 629 and 634, respectively.

Researchers said that could make those cities more attractive options for Millennials who have poor or minimal credit histories.