alt Hacker NewsLook up the median age of a home buyer in 2025:
It's 59 years old lol.
Boomers and institutional money are doing the home buying.
https://www.apolloacademy.com/median-age-of-all-us-homebuyer...
In 2009 the same chart shows that the median age was 39.
In the early 80s it was early 30s.
Look at congress, we live in a boomer gerontocracy. Not every boomer is wealthy and powerful, but the majority of people who are wealthy and powerful are either descendants of elites/wealthy, boomers, or a very small fraction of younger tech/finance/business owners.
The good news is - assuming there's not a big change in immigration rates - if you can rent cheaply enough for 10-20 years the boomers will start dying in sufficient numbers that if there is somehow no reversion on home prices in the mean time there should be insufficient buyers at that point and prices will eventually fall.
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This is all home buyers not first time home buyers. So it’s not clear what we can conclude. It could be that more retirees are buying a house to retire to rather than renting.
I imagine age of first time home buyers has also gone up but there’s no way it’s that high.
59 year olds were born in 1966, so the average homebuyer is from Gen X, not a Boomer.
>"if you can rent cheaply enough for 10-20 years the boomers will start dying in sufficient numbers that if there is somehow no reversion on home prices in the mean time there should be insufficient buyers at that point and prices will eventually fall"
But that "10-20 years" is your life, and there's no getting it back. Millennials (the largest generation in US history) have entered into our prime family starting age, and the fact that most are priced out of the housing market right now and stuck renting apartments is a complete tragedy. At a 90th percentile income, I can just barely be able to afford a home and provide for a family of 3-4 like our parents and grandparents did on a highschool education with no higher skills.
59 is really early Gen-X. The Boomers are all in their 60s and 70s now. They're downsizing.
> The good news is - assuming there's not a big change in immigration rates
There has been a big change in projected immigration rates: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61735