Houses Are Expensive. One Solution? Everyone Lives Together
If you’re in the market for a house, it’s the time of year you’d normally get excited to start searching.
But between the price of real estate and the cost of borrowing, buying a home in 2025 is expensive. And the latest economic headwinds could wind up making a purchase feel even more out of reach.
So how can you adapt? One increasingly popular option is to house more family under the same roof.
A survey released this week by the National Association of Realtors shows 17% of homes purchased between June 2023 and June 2024 were for some combination of parents, grandparents, adult children and/or adult siblings. That’s up from 14% in each of the previous two years and the most since NAR started measuring in 2012.
While multi-generational living is hardly a new trend, it’s become steadily more common in recent decades. A big factor is the growth in racial and ethnic groups that are more apt to live in multi-generational houses, according to Pew Research.
But an increase in job losses and foreclosures during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 also accelerated the movement toward pooling financial resources.
Similar economic factors would appear to be at play now, with saving money being cited most often among the latest batch of multi-generational buyers surveyed by NAR, particularly Millennials.
In fact, 36% of buyers said they bought for “cost savings,” up from 22% in the previous 12 months. (In contrast, there was a slight decline in the percentage of buyers who attributed the purchase to caring for aging parents or because adult children or other relatives were moving back home.)
So what? Millennials had been the biggest contingent of homebuyers for years, but are now behind baby boomers. Without proceeds from the sale of a previous home to rely on, high rents, student loan debt and child care costs have made it difficult for many of them to come up with a down payment.
But thinking outside the box can help. There are still creative ways to adapt to this daunting housing market.
Related Reading
• One Answer to High Mortgage Rates: A Smaller Home (SoFi)
• Under One Roof: The Secrets to Success for Multi-Generational Living (Ikea)
• Rent vs Buy Calculator (Trulia)
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