Median age of 1st time homebuyer in the United States is now 40

 

Stock photo of a couple buying a home. New York Post. 

The median age of a 1st time homebuyer in the United States is now 40 years old. New York Post. The age has increased dramatically since 2020 as it was 33 back then. It was 38 in 2024. First time home buyers makes up only 21% of the market, the lowest since the data has been tracked in 1981. 24% of those home buyers do not have kids and 21% said childcare costs were a factor in what they could afford. Median age of all buyers is 59 and the median age of repeat buyers is 62, both of which are records. The only good news is that interest rates have decreased with 30 year mortgages median being 6.17%. Prices are extremely high due to high demand, low supply and a lack of new starter homes. A general lack of funds and high down payments are also limiting things. 

My Comment:

The repercussions of the 2020 pandemic and the Biden administrations economic and immigration policies continue. Home ownership now appears to be beyond most people in their younger years and the days of young families being able to buy homes as they start their families is long gone. This is, in short, a huge problem, and one that needs to be dealt with. 

I am, of course, directly affected by this issue. I'm around 40 and I absolutely would like to buy a home, but the home prices in my area are out of my range. I have enough savings built up that I could afford a home at the lower end of the range, but those homes almost exclusively are either tear downs, requiring a lot of money I don't have to get them up to snuff, or are mutli-family homes, and I have zero desire to be a landlord. 

And I'm a lot better off than a lot of people! I have a large amount of money saved up, my region of the country isn't that expensive and I have no debt or children to worry about. I don't know how the folks that have kids, car payments or student loans to deal with can ever hope to buy a home in most parts of the country. Sure, there are cheap places in the country still, but they are cheap for a reason, there are no jobs there, or they are crime ridden hell-holes. 

So why are things so bad? Much of it has to do with immigration, legal or otherwise. Joe Biden let in an absurd number of people during his term. Though it's hard to quantify the number of illegal immigrants for obvious reasons, he let in 5 million legal immigrants. Estimates are around 14 million people came illegally as well. In a country of 340 million people, letting in roughly 20 million people is obviously going to drive property values sky high. 

That's not the only problem of course. Another major problem is the fact that nobody is building the right kind of housing. In my area at least, nobody is building starter homes, the kinds with one or two bedrooms and a bath or bath and half. These are the kinds of homes that new buyers can almost afford in this environment.

These homes aren't getting built. They don't have the profit margin of the "mcmansions" that are getting built. These homes cost between $700,000 to $1 million and only the very wealthy can afford them. This isn't all downside, as the people that buy these houses free up other homes for other buyers, but it's like three or four steps removed from the folks that are in the market for starter homes. 

Personal finances are a problem too. Most folks aren't putting away money like I am, and even if they are, the inflation under Biden is still having major effects. Everything got more expensive under him but we didn't see the wage growth needed to make up for it. The bad financial decisions folks are making with debt isn't helping things either. 

From a wider political view, this does represent a major problem for President Trump and the Republicans. Though they were largely not responsible for these issues (though Republicans deserve some of the blame for inflation as they went along with the inflation increasing giveaways that Biden put into place), they also are in power, and folks in power get blamed for things that happen regardless of who is to blame. 

There is some evidence that things are getting better. Obviously, interest rates have dropped slightly and Trump has managed, through deportations and self deportations, to reduce the illegal immigrant population by 2 million people. This has lead to a slight decrease in demand and I have seen it in home prices. This is a thing that should continue to help as more and more folks get deported. 

Of course having the prices go down $10k isn't much relief when the median home price is more than $400,000. And if you are in a high price area it's basically nothing. This will improve with time but folks want results now and if things aren't better by a year from now, things might get rough in the 2026 midterms. 

Finally, I do think this is yet another example of major milestones being delayed or inaccessible. Folks are having trouble getting jobs, getting married and getting homes and it's never been tougher to be a young person, outside of obvious situations like war or famine. I don't really have a solution to any of this, except avoiding voting for the folks that have made things like this in the first place.