Sidestepping Starter Homes

The real estate market is increasingly pricing out many Americans from homeownership, particularly Millennial buyer hopefuls.

As a result, Millennials are renting their homes longer, and therefore saving up longer to afford to buy a home. Once they do buy at that later time, Millennials are looking for higher-end homes, according to Business Insider. Spencer Rascoff, Zillow's CEO, says "Many people are basically skipping starter homes; they're renting until their 30s ... and they just are not even buying the $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 home, which is a total mind shift as compared with previous generations. So they're still buying homes — they're just buying them later and buying them bigger."

First-time homebuyers needed 23 percent of their income to afford an entry-level home in the second quarter of 2018, an increase of 2 percentage points from the previous year, according to The Real Deal. Last May, the median price of previously owned homes was $264,800, the most expensive it'd been in a decade.

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