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Without taking away from the reality of housing costs, the long-term chart [1, chart is a year old but looking for trends] suggests other explanations. In parti
by runako 2y ago
Without taking away from the reality of housing costs, the long-term chart [1, chart is a year old but looking for trends] suggests other explanations. In particular, the average of first-time buyers was 35, up from 30 as recently as 2010. That's a bad trend.
The overall average appears to be driven by people who have bought homes before. Anecdotally, the Boomers I know bought houses well into retirement where their parents typically made their last home purchase in their 30s. I am less concerned about housing turnover among older people.
1 - https://www.axios.com/2023/11/20/american-housing-market-older-homeowners-2023 https://www.axios.com/2023/11/20/american-housing-market-old...
- doctorpangloss 2y agoA lot of never-purchased-home-before people have money but still don't buy a home. Why? What happens that causes people who have money and can pay to finally buy a home?
- runako 2y agoA lot of reasons! Some I have heard: - Homeownership comes with responsibilities that people may not want - They prefer to invest the money elsewhere - They expect to relocate on timeframes shorter than those that make homeownership a good investment
- doctorpangloss 2y agoI'm asking, what causes people to buy a house for the first time? For upper middle class people the answer is probably having a baby, so you can see why if people are having babies later in life when their incomes are higher, prices rise.
- LVTfan 2y agobut the upper middle class is relatively small, depending on how you define upper middle class. Nationally, one might say the 15% who are below the 95th percentile (but locally is what matters for the purpose of buying property, and maybe "upper middle" is 60% to 95% of the local ranking).