How private equity is changing housing

When we bought our first home, a townhouse, in the early 1990s the builder only sold to people that were going to live in said home. They helped save the down payment and made sure that utility payments (gas/electric) were under a certain amount each month (super insulated and heated with a hybrid hot water system). Bigelow Homes, they were on a few This Old House episodes in the 80s.

It would be nice to see that again, the new housing market is ridiculous now.

That sounds like an absolute dream compared to today's market

Homeownership rates are not materially lower than before. Page 5 for the data, page 13 for the formula.

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf

I would bet most, if not almost all homes, are sold to buyers who will occupy them.

This graph goes further back:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

More info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...

Median age of ownership? Skews older now I'm guessing.

I was talking about the younger crowd trying to get a start.

> Median age of ownership? Skews older now I'm guessing

First-time homebuyer (FTB) "average and median age stood at 36.3 and 33 years for the period Q3:24-Q2:25, and there has been minimal FTB average age change since either 2001 or 2021" [1].

[1] https://www.aei.org/articles/nar-says-the-typical-first-time...

The issue is really felt more on the housing constrained markets. In these markets home prices weren't really very diverged from what we consider extremely low cost markets today very much. In the past 25 years, we've seen these low cost markets essentially stagnate or very hardly grow from 1990s prices, while high demand markets have gone up in price 4x or more in some cases over that time.

Now there are certainly high income buyers who can afford these 1-2-3-5 and up million dollar homes. But the very nature of who is a homebuyer is changing before our eyes in these places. The white collar office worker in 1990 who was buying in west la then is saddled with being a renter, because they only make $70k in west la. Their income hasn't 4x since 2000, not even close.

How does this change the makeup of who lives in the homes? Maybe that $70k worker would have shacked up with the home purchase, and had two kids to fill those spare two bedrooms, who go on to be enrolled in the school district, maybe work part time jobs, and hopefully stick around after and contribute to the regional economy. Instead, maybe that 3br home goes to a content creator, who uses one spare bedroom as a guest bedroom and the other spare for creating content. The school ends up short two potential pupils. The local economy loses two potential contributors, shops don't have anyone to hire and cut shifts and start a downward cycle of declining service and profit against rent increases until closure.