By James Rodriguez
Business Insider
By the time she turned 40, Suzie Payne had resigned herself to the fact that she would never be able to buy a home.
While her friends spent their 30s checking off that prized milestone — often with help from their parents — Payne struggled to save money while raising a daughter on her own. Home prices in Portland, Oregon, where she lived, felt out of reach long before the pandemic hit. Then Payne lost her job. When mortgage rates plummeted in the summer of 2020, she was more worried about meeting her basic needs than spending her Saturdays staking out open houses.
In 2021, though, Payne moved to Philadelphia, where the homebuying possibilities seemed to open up. She could still find an old rowhome in the city for a little more than $200,000, well within her price range. She got a new job, took classes for first-time homebuyers, and discovered that she qualified for a larger loan than she'd expected. In the summer of 2024, she enlisted the help of a real estate agent and submitted a winning bid on a house. She was 42.
Payne describes her path as "non-conventional," but she represents a sea change in real estate: First-time homebuyers are older than ever. A decade or two ago, Americans typically bought their first homes in their early 30s. By today's standards, however, Payne is right on track. New data from the National Association of Realtors shows that between mid-2024 and mid-2025, the typical age of a first-time buyer reached a record high of 40. The median age for all buyers rose to an all-time high of 59, up from 47 in 2019.
Things have been headed in this direction for a few years now — older, deep-pocketed buyers are better equipped to handle the double whammy of higher borrowing rates and costlier homes. Gen Xers and baby boomers remain active in the real estate market, while the share of purchases by first-time buyers has dwindled. But never before has the divide appeared so stark. This delayed timeline could have lifelong consequences for today's young people: years of missed wealth-building opportunities, fewer moves, even a reevaluation of what constitutes a "starter home." Welcome to the age of the geriatric homebuyer.
The typical first-time homebuyer was just 29 when the NAR began tracking the median age in 1981. The metric edged slightly higher in the four decades that followed, never ticking past 33. Then, between mid-2021 and mid-2022, it spiked to 36. There was a bit of cope around the sudden jump. Maybe it was just elder millennials — long labeled as laggards since graduating into the Great Recession — finally catching up. But even that cohort felt squeezed. Mortgage rates had more than doubled, homes were more expensive, and new construction after the Great Recession had failed to keep pace with the surge of young buyers. I talked to one millennial back then who framed the scenario in bleak terms: "We're royally screwed."
Things have only gotten worse. First-time buyers accounted for a record-low 21% of home purchases last year, NAR data shows — roughly half of the historical average. The entry-level buyer has been effectively "removed from this housing market," Jessica Lautz, the NAR's deputy chief economist, tells me.
"We have a very large young-adult population who are really just seeing the door shut on them for homeownership," Lautz says. "I think it speaks to the gridlock that we've seen in the housing market."
Taking their place is a swarm of "repeat buyers" who, at a median age of 62 (another record high), can put their piles of home equity to work on another purchase. Nearly a third of these repeat buyers paid all cash, NAR data shows, giving them a leg up with sellers who often prefer the ease and speed of deals that don't involve a mortgage. A whopping 26% of all buyers came in with all cash, yet another — you guessed it — record high.
Real estate agents tell me they feel the frustration. Peggy Pratt, a broker associate with Century 21 North East in Massachusetts, says it's harder for younger buyers to cobble together a down payment when they're weighed down by student debt and steep rental costs. Pratt specializes in helping people break into the housing market, with about half her business coming from first-time buyers. She says those who are able to gain a foothold often receive help from their parents — there are just fewer of them. On the opposite end, those who can't lean on family "feel that the state of the economy is working against them," Pratt tells me. "For the prices, it's nearly impossible for them."
Suzy Minken, an agent with Compass who works in both New Jersey and northern Virginia, says her clients are no longer buying up "starter homes" with dreams of moving into a bigger place down the line. Most have trouble finding a home they like in their price point, Minken says, so they delay their purchase and keep saving until they can buy a place that feels like less of a stepping stone and more of a permanent landing spot. NAR data backs this up — sellers last year had lived in their homes for a median of 11 years, an all-time high.
