Many Zoomers Don’t See a Path to Homeownership

Generation Z is increasingly seeing homeownership, one of the long-time pillars of the American Dream, as just that — a pipe dream.

That grim sentiment was captured in a survey conducted by the cash-offer home selling platform Clever Offers. Some 1,000 zoomers between the ages of 18 and 28 were polled earlier this summer, and many seem to think the housing market is stacked against them.

According to the survey, despite 90% of respondents saying they do want to own a home someday, 62% expressed concern that they never will. When asked to select from a list of their biggest barriers to owning a home, 47% said homes are too expensive, 28% said saving for a down payment, 28% said interest rates were too high, and 26% said they could barely make ends meet as it is.

Some 75% of respondents said that the cost of living has made it such that they currently cannot save enough money to afford a down payment.

Now, a down payment has popularly been understood to be around 20% of the price of a home, but that’s really only been the case for “repeat buyers,” ostensibly people with cash on hand or equity from their previous home.

A report by the National Association of Realtors stressed that first-time homebuyers have been putting down a whole lot less since at least the late 1980s. The typical down payment for that cohort has purportedly never been higher than 10% on average.

That’s a pretty big difference, but considering the national median price for a home in June was $435,300, you can’t really blame Generation Z too much for having such a dreary outlook. While wages have gone up the last few years (keeping pace with and sometimes exceeding the rate of inflation at certain points), home prices remain prohibitively high in many markets.

Putting a macabre point on it, Clever Offers’ survey asked respondents what felt more likely to occur for them other than owning a home in the next five years. They were allowed to choose from the following scenarios: World War 3, becoming homeless, winning the lottery, becoming an influencer, moving to another country, world peace, getting struck by lightning, or owning a self-driving car. Here are the results.

In a similarly dark vein, 58% said they would buy a home without central heating or air conditioning, 47% said they’d buy one with asbestos, and 46% said they’d buy one with foundation issues or a leaky roof.

Still, at the younger end of the zoomer age range (typically people born between 1997 and 2012), there seems to be some optimism, or rather, at least a pretty clear-eyed appreciation of homeownership as an attainable milestone.

Katelyn Chambers, an 18-year-old North Texas college freshman, told CandysDirt.com that she does want to own a home one day but acknowledged she’s not very familiar with all that would take to achieve. She said it was something that felt “very far off in the future, and not something that really would probably happen for me until I’m at a point in a career where I’m very [financially] stable.”