Despite what you’ve heard, first time homebuyers are not getting dramatically older.
Statistics are like hot dogs — often juicy but with sometimes questionable ingredients. A recent example is a story racing around the country: first-time homebuyers’ median age is 40 this year, versus just 28 years old in 1991. This alarming trend was explored in a November 6 New York Times article, citing survey data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR).
But I fell into a trap of my own making, by ingesting a “wow” statistic that reinforced my own experience — I bought my first house in 1991 at age 29. Now I’m hearing this stat everywhere, in news stories and recent conferences I’ve attended. Statistics like this go viral, by simultaneously carrying “factual weight” and yet stirring emotions.
Yet the statistic, as compelling as it seems, is likely wrong. Housing economists Edward J. Pinto and Joseph S. Tracy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have recently reported why. The two delved into the less-than-appetizing ways the NAR statistic was created. In July 2025, the NAR team sent out 173,250 surveys with 120 questions to answer online.
Only 6,103 people bothered to answer, a response rate of 3.5 percent. Only 1,281 of that group were first-time homebuyers.
Not only that, but the AEI team found that those under 35 were under-represented by 17 percent and those aged 45 to 74 were over-represented by 18 percentage points.
The NAR economists claim their statistics have ninety-five percent confidence, plus or minus 1.25 percent, but statistical confidence for representing a US population of around 86 million homeowners collapses when the sample is no longer random. Fancy weighting techniques may give an aura of fixing the problem, but rely on subjective guesswork and hard-to-track biases.
Pinto and Tracy at AEI instead used the New York Federal Reserve Bank Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), which uses a five-percent random sample of all credit reports tied to a Social Security number, and provides borrower age and home buying history.
And guess what they found? The median age of the first-time homebuyer is approximately 33 years old — not 40 — and has been steady between 2001 and today. Research by The Cato Institute using the US Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey also “casts doubt” on the NAR data, revealing results similar to those reported by AEI researchers.
The incorrect NAR fact nugget might rapidly dissolve if it didn’t carry so much emotional resonance with those who feel the housing market is “unfair.” But here’s the deeper problem: when a statistic feels true, because it fits in our narrative of how the world works, its power can rapidly sway public policies in the wrong direction.
What Pinto and other housing experts agree upon (including the NAR economists) is a widespread housing affordability problem, but the larger lesson is that it is impacting people across all ages. Thanks to zoning restrictions on housing density and other challenges, we’re simply not building enough homes.
What’s more, we make it very difficult for many to purchase homes in less-affluent areas, by making so-called “small dollar mortgages” less profitable for banks to issue. Dodd-Frank banking regulations in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession vastly increased the overhead for issuing these loans, resulting in a rapid drop in mortgage access at the lower end of the market, as The Wall Street Journal has previously reported.
My research with colleagues at New America shows that millions of inexpensive homes exist in the United States, but the financing is unavailable for many families. This leads to falling homeownership rates, and in some cases, property values. Only 23 percent of homes that cost below $100,000 (including condos) were purchased with a mortgage loan, according to a 2020 Urban Institute study. Cash buyers made up the rest.
Community banks, which are more likely to serve these customers, are particularly hard hit by the Dodd-Frank banking regulations. Since 2010 we have lost over 3,600 community banks, “a reduction of over 45 percent,” according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s remarks at a conference in October 2025.
In other words, if we want to concentrate on improving homeownership across all ages, we need to base our policies on statistics that are built upon rigorous methodological foundations. Otherwise, repeating an appetizing but incorrect statistic around first-time homeownership could lead to chronic economic heartburn.
