• Prospective homebuyers can snag some pretty good deals on houses right now.
• Sellers are giving concessions to attract buyers amid high mortgage rates and economic uncertainty.
• Here are the top 10 cities where buyers can essentially negotiate a discount on their house.

Americans are feeling pretty down in the dumps about the economy as recession fears grow. But one group's prospects may actually be on the mend: homebuyers.

If you're on the hunt for a house, you may be in luck as the real-estate market slowly starts to tilt in favor of buyers, according to Redfin.

The biggest sign? Home sellers are giving concessions to buyers. Across the nation, 44.4% of home sales included a concession in Q1 of 2025, up from 39.3% a year earlier.

Sellers are throwing in the kitchen sink — literally. Concessions come in many forms and are used by sellers to sweeten a deal and encourage buyers to close the transaction faster. For example, sellers may offer to cover closing costs, pay for home repairs or appliances, buy down the mortgage rate, or pay for other miscellaneous fees.

Homeowners who are putting their houses on the market are quickly realizing they need to resort to concessions or even straight-up price reductions to seal the deal.

Many sellers bought their homes in 2021 and 2022 when home values were at record highs, so they're eager to ask for a high price to make back their money, Redfin real estate agents said.

Unfortunately for sellers, buyers simply aren't having it.

According to Redfin, the median asking price for a house is $469,729, but the median sale price is 9% lower at $431,057 — meaning that sellers are being forced to temper their expectations and lower their prices.

"There's a growing disconnect between what sellers think they can get for their homes and the direction the market is actually moving," said Redfin Senior Economist Elijah de la Campa.

Buyers are gaining the upper hand

There are a lot more sellers than buyers in the housing market, and buyers are hesitant to pull the trigger on a big transaction during a time of increased economic uncertainty. Elevated mortgage rates and expensive home prices are further discouraging buyers.

"When buyers and sellers are on different planets, one side eventually has to give in, and it's looking like it's going to be sellers this time," De la Campa said. "Rising inventory, price drops and seller concessions indicate this is already starting to happen, and sale-price growth will likely continue to slow as a result."

Buyers should take advantage of this dynamic, Chaley McVay, a Redfin real estate agent in Portland, Oregon, recommends.

"If you're a buyer and you find a home you like that's a bit above your price range, I encourage you to get the conversation started and make an offer anyway. A lot of house hunters are hesitant to offer under the asking price, but in this market, it's not out of the ordinary to see sellers lower their prices and give concessions."

Top 10 cities where sellers are giving concessions

Listed below are the top 10 US metro areas where sellers gave concessions in Q1 2025, along with the percentage of home sales with concessions for each city.

Seattle, WA

% of home sales with concessions: 71.3%

Portland, OR

% of home sales with concessions: 63.9%

Atlanta, GA

% of home sales with concessions: 61.5%

San Diego, CA

% of home sales with concessions: 60.7%

Denver, CO

% of home sales with concessions: 59.2%

Los Angeles, CA

% of home sales with concessions: 56.1%

Sacramento, CA

% of home sales with concessions: 52.5%

Las Vegas, NV

% of home sales with concessions: 51.9%

Riverside, CA

% of home sales with concessions: 51.2%

Phoenix, AZ

% of home sales with concessions: 51.2%

Thousands of real estate agents across the US opened their email Saturday night to find an unexpected message from Andy Florance, the CEO of CoStar Group and Homes.com. As the top executive for one of real estate's largest search websites, Florance had a lot on his mind. For months, the industry has been embroiled in a fight over "exclusive inventory" — homes marketed for sale by real estate agents but purposely kept off public search portals like Homes.com or Realtor.com. Florance wasn't writing to complain about this practice, though. He'd set his sights on another target: his company's chief rival, Zillow.

Two days earlier, Zillow had unveiled a new rule threatening to blacklist scores of homes from its well-trafficked website. The surprise announcement took direct aim at exclusive inventory, also known as secret or hidden home listings. A growing number of agents at large brokerages, most notably the national power player Compass, had been hoarding listings and testing the waters by advertising them on their own websites before sharing the homes widely across the internet. Zillow said it would permanently ban from its site any listing that had gone through this preview period. If you're going to market a home somewhere, the company argued, you have to market it everywhere.

Zillow, by far the most popular destination for online home shoppers, framed the move as a defense of consumers: "Fragmented listing access — in which a home is available on one platform but not another, or shared with some agents but not others — creates frustration and distrust," the company said in its announcement. But Florance wasn't having it. He lambasted Zillow's new rule as "an incredible move of audacity and a pure power play of epic proportions." Homes.com, Florance told the agents, would happily welcome any listings scorned by Zillow.

This is the messy state of play in real estate: With sales stuck in a protracted malaise, agent commissions under pressure, and the rules of the game in flux, everyone is scrambling to protect their share of the homebuying pie. Zillow's declaration adds yet another twist, marking an explosive turning point in the long-simmering dispute over exclusive inventory and hidden home listings. The company is flexing its considerable muscle, presenting agents with a daunting choice: Either share your listing with Zillow and everyone else as soon as you so much as stake a sign in the front yard, or explain to your client why their home will never appear on the website that's become synonymous with real estate.

"That's the spark," says Mike DelPrete, a tech strategist and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder. "And now everybody, whether they like it or not, they have to have a position. They have to make some decisions, and they need to act."

Many agents don't bother with exclusive inventory. As soon as they agree to market a home on behalf of a seller, they add it to the multiple listing service, or MLS, a local database that shares the information with other agents, brokerages, and big search portals like Zillow. Once a listing is live in the MLS, it's pretty much everywhere.

But agents have other options that are growing more popular. They can quietly shop a home around to other agents within their brokerage, a practice known as "office exclusives." These are shared via email, word of mouth, or internal listing platforms, so the homes don't actually pop up on the internet for casual browsers to see. Another option is to add the listing to the MLS and advertise the home publicly on the brokerage's website but opt out of the data feeds that share listings with other websites that display homes, including other brokerages and search portals like Zillow. In both instances, a brokerage like Compass, the largest in the country by sales volume, can lure agents and clients with early access to homes they can't find anywhere else. There's been a lot of debate over whether this is actually good for the seller, but the financial upside for the brokerage is enormous.

It's easy to get bogged down in the details of how this all works, and it remains to be seen how Zillow will actually implement these changes. But the spirit of Zillow's new rule, spelled out in last week's announcement, is pretty simple: "If a listing is online, it should be online everywhere." Redfin, another leading search portal, has taken a similar stance, saying it will also ban listings that are not shared everywhere. Both sites notably make exceptions for homes that were originally office exclusives — if a seller wants to remain truly private, they can do so within the walls of their brokerage and turn to Zillow or Redfin later. But as soon as the general public can lay eyes on a home, the broker has a day to share it with everyone through the MLS — or else. (Zillow has said that listings can be unbanned if the seller breaks up with their broker.)

Zillow's hardline stance has already mobilized support. At least two big brokerages — eXp Realty, the third-largest brokerage by sales volume, according to the consulting firm T3 Sixty, and NextHome, which has 6,000 agents nationwide — have made public commitments to abide by Zillow's policy. The Consumer Policy Center, a new nonpartisan think tank, has also come out in support of the new rule.

"We encourage all brokers to support Zillow's efforts to maintain the transparency of real estate markets and prevent their balkanization," Stephen Brobeck, a senior fellow at CPC and a former senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America, said in a statement.

But there are problems with Zillow and Redfin's position. Ironically, they could push more home listings into the shadows by encouraging brokerages like Compass to pursue "office exclusives" rather than sharing homes publicly on the Compass website. They also risk appearing power-hungry and desperate to preserve their web traffic (and bottom lines) at all costs.

"It's not the flex they think it is," says Amanda Orson, the founder and CEO of Galleon, an alternative marketplace that connects homebuyers and sellers directly. "It's a tell. Zillow realized that not having all of the inventory available is their Achilles' heel, and they just telegraphed it."

Glenn Kelman, Redfin's CEO, doesn't see it that way. The search portals, like the MLS, track how long a house has been on the market and whether the seller has dropped the price — data points that end up harming sellers, in Compass CEO Robert Reffkin's telling. If that's the issue, Kelman says he's fine with dropping that info entirely. Redfin has called on MLSes to create an option that would allow agents to share listings while preventing websites from showing price drops and days on market, which Kelman describes as a middle ground. The most important thing, he says, is for consumers to be able to see all the homes no matter which website they visit.

"You shouldn't have to go to 10 different websites to see 10 different sets of inventory," Kelman tells me. "That will be a challenge for consumers."

Here's one thing I'm sure of: This is a mess. There are more than 500 MLSes around the country, each with its own policies and enforcement mechanisms. Compass appears unlikely to back down from exclusive inventory, setting up more battles down the line. In an email to Compass agents the day after Zillow's announcement, Reffkin advised agents to "keep doing what you're doing."

"This moment goes beyond a policy — it's about control versus choice," Reffkin wrote.

For the average American trying to hop into the housing market, the new battle will likely only cause confusion and frustration. Sellers may not know what they're agreeing to when they opt for a limited advertising campaign, or they may turn litigious when they realize their homes have been blacklisted from Zillow. Buyers may be forced to scour a range of websites to get an idea of what's out there, and even then, they could risk overlooking their dream home. Even real estate executives are confused about some of this stuff — now imagine the reaction of a typical buyer or seller, who goes through this kind of transaction only a handful of times in their lives.

When confusion runs rampant among regular consumers — when the very rules of the game are unclear — that's usually a sign that government intervention could be on the way.

"As much as many of us wouldn't like that to happen, it's kind of getting set up to where it could happen," Saul Klein, a longtime real estate executive and the CEO of the San Diego MLS, tells me. "And so I think we've got to be real careful and work not to keep confusing the marketplace."

Indeed, Andy Florance's email to agents over the weekend included a postscript with a link to contact the Department of Justice. But government action is hardly guaranteed, and it could be years before anything happens. In the interim, expect the fight to get uglier.

"There is something larger at stake than just who gets control of the inventory," Kelman tells me. "It's the US housing market, and we're supposed to all be at an age where we actually care about that. And I think everybody does, but emotions are just running high right now."

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.

To anyone snooping on Zillow, it appears that the two-bedroom condo at 364 Arkansas Street, in San Francisco's sunny Potrero Hill neighborhood, is not for sale. The site can only offer a hazy estimate of the home's value, basic facts about the property, and some grainy, decade-old photos from the last time it traded hands. Other popular home-listing portals — Redfin, Realtor.com, Homes.com — deliver the same result. The house is "off-market."

The condo is for sale, though, with an asking price of $999,000. I know this because I visited the website of Compass, the country's largest real estate brokerage by sales volume and the firm representing the home's seller. There, 364 Arkansas Street is tucked away from the rest of the internet, along with a vast trove of other homes listed for sale by Compass agents.

This is no accident or failure on the part of the seller's broker. Zillow and its competitors made their names by compiling home listings in one place, helping regular homebuyers navigate a once opaque market. But a monthslong fight over control of these listings, led by Compass CEO Robert Reffkin, is fracturing the housing landscape. A growing number of agents, especially those affiliated with Compass, are advising sellers to opt for a more limited advertising campaign for their homes. In some cases, this means an early release on the broker's website before sharing the listing more widely across the internet, essentially testing the waters before it technically hits the market. In other instances, agents may push their sellers to hide their homes from public view entirely, marketing them exclusively among agents who belong to the same brokerage, or within select groups of brokers known as "private listing networks." This state of play has spawned weird situations like the one in San Francisco: A home may be publicly touted for sale on one brokerage's website while lying dormant everywhere else.

The new reality poses the greatest threat to Zillow and other portals that subsist on an unfettered flow of data. Instead of scrolling happily through Zillow or Redfin, you might have to bounce from site to site in search of a home or hire the agent who seems like they have access to the most listings. Even then, you may be stuck with the feeling that more hidden homes are on the market, lingering just out of view.

The day of reckoning for search portals like Zillow is a long way off. Still, there's no denying the shift underway — in February, Reffkin told analysts that more than half of new Compass sellers were opting to "premarket" their homes within the walls of the brokerage before sharing their listings in all the usual places. Exclusive listings aren't novel, but Compass' aggressive push in that direction has roiled the rest of the industry. And it's far from the only company employing this tactic. Even Redfin, which runs a brokerage business in addition to its search portal, has threatened to adopt the Compass playbook.

"Writing blog posts and being all high and mighty and idealistic about how a marketplace ought to work, that's one approach," Glenn Kelman, Redfin's CEO, tells me. "And the other approach is a little more Hobbesian, which is, when you're punched in the face, punch back."

The threat to real estate portals — not to mention the house hunters and casual lurkers who love to browse them — became clear late last month. For the past half-decade, the National Association of Realtors, an industry group that effectively sets the rules for buying and selling homes in America, has been trying to stem the rise of "pocket listings," homes that are quietly advertised among a select group rather than shared widely. In 2019, NAR adopted the "clear cooperation policy," which requires agents to contribute listings to local databases within one day of marketing them publicly. The databases, known as multiple listing services, feed that info to other brokerages and search sites like Zillow, ensuring everyone can get a clear view of the homes for sale in that area. Over the past year, though, Reffkin has led the charge to get rid of the clear cooperation rule, arguing home sellers should have control over where and how their homes are marketed.

After months of debate, NAR said in late March that it would hold firm — sort of. While clear cooperation remains intact, the group also unveiled a new policy that will allow sellers to list homes on the MLS but opt out of sending their data to sites like Zillow for a period of time. These so-called "delayed marketing" listings will be available for other agents to find in the MLS and may be publicly advertised on the listing broker's website, but they'll be missing from the data feeds that send listings to the rest of the internet. And because regular buyers rarely have access to their local MLSes, they could end up relying more on agents to show them what's out there. All of this may sound nonsensical (why not get your home in front of as many people as possible?), but sellers and their agents have various reasons for slow-rolling their listings.

To get an idea of how this works in practice, take a look at Compass' proposed "three-phased marketing strategy" for sellers. The first step is to debut the home in Compass' internal database as a Private Exclusive, available only to Compass' network 34,000 agents and their "millions of clients." Unlike the MLS or a search portal like Zillow, the Compass database doesn't show whether the price has been cut or how long the house has been on the market, details that Reffkin argues can harm a seller by giving buyers more negotiating power. The next phase is what's known as a Coming Soon: The house is listed in the MLS and launched publicly on Compass.com, but isn't sent anywhere else. (That San Francisco condo I mentioned earlier is at this stage.) Some agents outside the brokerage may see it in the MLS, but again, the Compass site doesn't show price drops or days on the market. It does, however, signal that "increased competition for the listing will be coming soon when it's launched on all other sites," according to Compass. The third phase is the all-hands-on-deck approach: The listing goes live in all the typical online outlets.

Compass likens this road map to testing a product with a smaller audience before launch. A seller can tinker with the price, gauge the reception among Compass clients, and see if they can get a buyer to bite. A limited release may also appeal to sellers concerned about privacy. Reffkin and other Compass leaders have campaigned on a platform of "seller choice," the idea that a homeowner should have full control over how their home is marketed rather than surrender it to other platforms like Zillow.

"With NAR introducing a new MLS policy to 'expand choice for consumers,' they acknowledged the clear cooperation policy restricted home seller choice," Reffkin said in a statement after NAR's announcement last month. "Expanding choice means that NAR is still not letting homeowners choose precisely how to market their homes, but this is a small step in the right direction."

Those on the opposite side of the debate say most sellers just want to sell quickly for top dollar, and they argue sharing homes everywhere is the best way to achieve that. Even if a buyer offers you a dream price during that first phase in Compass' playbook, who's to say that a Zillow-fueled bidding war wouldn't deliver an even greater sum? Bret Weinstein, the founder and CEO of the Denver brokerage Guide Real Estate, says he can already envision the lawsuits from aggrieved sellers claiming they were duped into this "exclusive" marketing strategy.

"You're a few phone calls away from someone saying, 'Hey, I would have paid X amount for this house if I had known about it,'" Weinstein tells me.

Buyers, on the other hand, may miss out on their dream home if they choose the wrong agent or fail to scour every website. Buyers' agents may also be able to better justify their commissions if they can unlock a corner of the market for their clients, showing them homes they can't find anywhere else.

Both sides of the aisle may claim they're crusading on behalf of consumers, but you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone in the industry arriving at this debate with a neutral point of view.

"Everybody's got a financial bias," says Mike DelPrete, a real-estate tech strategist and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder. "At the end of the day, everyone involved has a financial dog in this fight."

The lifeblood of the real estate industry is inventory: the properties listed for sale every day by ordinary homeowners. "Listings are fuel," says Stephen Capezza, a real estate consultant who's held executive roles at both Zillow and the brokerage firm Side. Search portals draw millions of visitors each month with home listings supplied by brokerages and the MLSes. The portals then make their money by turning leads — customers who signal their interest in finding an agent or getting a mortgage — into cash through a referral system. Let's say you find a home on Zillow and click the buttons to "contact agent" or "request a tour." In many cases, Zillow won't connect you with the listing agent who represents the seller. Instead, the company will pass your information along to another agent who pays for access to Zillow's user base, either by shelling out a monthly advertising fee or promising a percentage of their commission, sometimes as much as 40%. Last year, more than 70% of Zillow's revenue — about $1.6 billion — came from its referral programs and other services for real estate professionals, annual filings show. That dollar figure was up 10% from the year prior, which the company attributed to an increase in revenue per visit and the number of visits.

The free flow of listings doesn't just benefit the giant search portals. It also levels the playing field for smaller brokerages or independent agents, allowing those with limited inventory to compete with the big guys. If large brokerages exert greater control over listings, hoarding them on their own websites or shopping them around internally, they stand to gain a clear edge in the marketplace. They can convince agents to come into the fold and sway clients by touting their exclusive inventory. They can also monetize leads through their own websites rather than handing those opportunities to another search portal. Even if most of those homes eventually go public — Compass says 94% of its exclusive listings end up on the MLS — the company can still lure customers by offering them a first look. In a tight market where every day matters, that's a seductive sell.

Keeping listings in-house could lead to big bucks for mega brokers. DelPrete estimates that Compass stands to generate $3.5 million in revenue for every 100 agents recruited, $1.1 million for every 100 closed leads funneled through its website, and $570,000 for every 100 "double-ended deals," sales in which Compass agents represent both the buyer and seller. And since brokerages typically take a cut of every commission, DelPrete says the companies could use their exclusive inventory to increase the percentage their agents hand over. If Compass could claim even 1% more of its agents' commissions, the company could haul in an extra $56 million in annual profit, according to DelPrete's analysis.

"A brokerage's job is to provide value to their agents," DelPrete tells me. "Right now, Compass is providing value to agents."

There is a chance that these changes will only register as a minor disruption for Zillow and the like. Perhaps Compass can sway some sellers to pursue their premarketing strategy, but most homeowners expect their homes to end up on the big search portals because that's where the buyers are.

"I mean, shoot, there are 'SNL' skits on Zillow," Capezza tells me. "It's synonymous with real estate. It's going to take more than a great debate, a couple changes to clear cooperation, to change consumer behavior."

Zillow makes a similar argument: Just follow the consumers. For now, they're scrolling through the search portals.

"It's clear what consumers want: open access to listings when they're searching for a home and exposure to the greatest number of buyers when they're selling," Errol Samuelson, Zillow's chief industry development officer, said in an emailed statement. "Companies like Zillow that deliver for consumers — in partnership with great real estate industry professionals — will succeed, not the companies putting their own interests ahead of the needs of home buyers and sellers."

But there are also clear reasons for concern for Zillow, Redfin, and their ilk. Four years ago, DelPrete wrote a blog post outlining the biggest threats to the search portals. Exclusive inventory was No. 1. He likened the situation to the fiercely competitive world of video streaming, in which companies like Netflix and Hulu have plowed billions of dollars into exclusive content. You may turn to Max on Sunday nights for your "White Lotus" fix, but only Netflix can satisfy your "Love Is Blind" cravings. We're stuck paying for all these different platforms because each offers its own private garden of movies and shows.

"When it comes to browsing for real estate, consumers want access to all of the available inventory," DelPrete wrote. "If a certain portion of listings are held off-market, available exclusively on another platform, consumer eyeballs will naturally follow."

Just shy of 10,000 Compass listings are currently in the premarketing phases, advertised as Coming Soon or held closely as Private Exclusives. On the one hand, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of thousands of homes for sale on Zillow right now. But other large brokerages either have their own such programs or have promised to follow suit if this turns into an all-out battle for inventory. The 10 largest brands accounted for about 60% of US home sales volume last year, according to data from T3 Sixty, a consulting firm for residential real estate brokerages. If even a few lean heavily into exclusive listings, they could trigger a domino effect across the industry.

The online search portals ushered in what you might call a Golden Age of Home Search: Instead of relying on agents to guide them through the market's offerings, buyers could take matters into their own hands. It wasn't perfect. Pocket listings have always existed in some form or another, and rules encouraging cooperation among agents are notoriously difficult to enforce. But the behind-the-scenes plumbing of the MLSes gave homebuyers the ability to navigate the market with ease, comforted by the notion that they were seeing pretty much everything out there. That era may be fading.

"When you think about the future, you have to look at what's happening now," DelPrete tells me. "This is happening. It has been happening. And it's turning into a significant competitive advantage for Compass."

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.

Redfin is being acquired in an all-stock transaction that values the real estate listing platform at $1.75 billion. The acquiring company is Rocket Companies, a Detroit, Michigan-based finance and real estate holding firm that owns various brands, including Rocket Mortgage, Rocket Money (formerly Truebill), and Rocket Loans. The combined entity will essentially pool the two […]

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• The red-hot US housing market could cool off slightly in 2025, making it easier to buy a home.
• Expect stable or declining mortgage rates and more housing inventory, according to Redfin.
• However, it's still prohibitively difficult for younger homebuyers to break into the market.

The American dream of home ownership has become increasingly harder to achieve in the last few years. Home prices are elevated, mortgage rates are high, and housing supply is constrained. That's not to mention the growing threat of climate change, which is driving up housing costs such as insurance, HOA fees, and property taxes in high-risk states.

There's both some good and bad news on the horizon for homebuyers, according to housing market experts.

The good news? On the whole, it'll be easier to buy a house in 2025. But the bad news, for younger homebuyers at least, is that's mostly just the case for boomers. Homeownership is actually looking as distant as ever for first-time buyers, especially Gen Z and millennials.

3 reasons it'll be easier to buy a house in 2025

First, housing prices are projected to increase slower than in previous years. Redfin economists Daryl Fairweather and Chen Zhao predict that median US home-sale prices will rise by 4% in 2025. Goldman Sachs has a similar outlook for 2025, predicting that US home prices will increase by 4.4%. That's roughly in line with median wage growth. Considering that US home prices shot up over 40% between March 2020 and January 2024, this sanguine prediction is good news for prospective homebuyers.

Another impediment to homeownership has been high mortgage rates, which have more than doubled in the last few years. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate has risen from below 3% in 2021 to around 7%.

While a 7% rate is still high historically, it's a sign of improvement from this housing cycle's high of 7.8% in October 2023. And rates could come down further in 2025, according to housing market experts. Redfin expects mortgage rates to stay the same or decrease next year. Realtor.com forecasts mortgage rates to end 2025 at 6.2%.

Lastly, experts predict that new housing inventory will hit the market, bringing relief on the supply side. A Republican sweep in Congress is a positive sign for homebuilders, as the construction industry will benefit from fewer regulations, according to Redfin.

In October before the election, Jeffery Roach, chief economist of LPL Financial, said that an increase in housing starts, or construction of new residential housing units, was a signal for more single-family homes hitting the market over the course of the next few quarters. According to Realtor.com, housing starts for new single-family homes could hit 1.1 million in 2025, a 13.8% increase.

All of these factors could improve the housing market going into 2025. Redfin predicts that home sales will increase anywhere between 2% and 9% next year.

No houses for young homebuyers

But unfortunately, if you're a first-time homebuyer, you're probably out of luck. Redfin doesn't expect the increase in home sales to be driven by young or working-class buyers. It's looking likely that any new housing inventory that hits the market will go toward older Americans first.

"Instead, affordable homes will be snapped up by older buyers who are priced out of higher price tiers," Fairweather and Zhao wrote in a recent report.

Indeed, first-time homebuyers are having unprecedented difficulty in the housing market. It's typically more difficult for first-time buyers to purchase a home because they don't have funds from selling a previous home to use for a down payment and mortgage payments, Redfin said in a June report, but today's housing environment is especially hostile towards young buyers.

Wages simply haven't kept up with the pace of home price increases over the past five years. According to Elijah de la Campa, a Redfin senior economist, the cost of starter homes have increased twice as fast as incomes during that time. Additionally, for Gen Z and millennials, student loans and credit card debt are emerging as roadblocks to homeownership, as it's difficult to qualify for mortgages with a poor credit score and high levels of debt.

As a result, the median age of first-time homebuyers is now 38, according to the National Association of Realtors — an all-time high. That's up from 35 in 2023. First-time homebuyers are also an increasingly smaller proportion of the market, at just 24% in the 12-month period ending in June 2024. The year prior, that proportion was 32%.

Comparatively, boomers have an advantage in the housing market. According to Edward Yardeni, president of financial research firm Yardeni Research, boomers own roughly half of the nation's net worth and homeowner equity, giving them a leg up in the housing market. Now, as boomers age and look to downsize their homes or move elsewhere for retirement, they can take advantage of the home equity they've amassed from years of home ownership.

"Gen Zers, meanwhile, will keep living with family or renting until well into their 30s," wrote Fairweather and Zhao.