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- NAR says the median first-time homebuyer was 40 this year, up from 28 in 1992—but can we trust the data?
NAR says the median first-time homebuyer was 40 this year, up from 28 in 1992—but can we trust the data?
New NAR data shows first-time buyers hitting age 40, but other sources tell a different story. We break down the divergence—and what generational trends really reveal.
Lance Lambert
November 17, 2025
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Earlier this month, the National Association of Realtors released its annual survey, which found that the median age of first-time U.S. homebuyers in 2025 climbed to 40. That’s up from 38 in 2024—and far above the median age in 1992, when it was 28.
At first glance, it appears that deteriorating housing affordability—driven by the Pandemic Housing Boom and the 2022 mortgage-rate shock—has pushed the age of first-time buyers higher.
However, when you look across other data sources, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the U.S. Census Bureau, you don’t see the same spike. For today’s piece, ResiClub dug deeper into the data to figure out what’s really going on.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the average first-time homebuyer in 2024 was 36.3 years old—just a little younger than NAR’s estimate of the median first-time homebuyer age of 38 in 2024.
Initially, one might suspect the difference simply stems from the fact that the New York Fed reports an “average” while NAR reports a “median”. However, when you peel back the onion, you’ll see there’s a large historical divergence between the two organizations’ figures that goes beyond just an average vs. median divergence. That raises the question: How did they each collect their data.
The NAR data series is calculated by an annual survey. For this year's survey, NAR mailed out a 120-question survey to 173,250 recent home buyers. The recent home buyers had to have purchased a primary residence home between July 2024 and June 2025. In total, 6,103 responses were received this year.
The New York Fed doesn’t collect its data by survey. Instead, it’s looking at credit report data, which they say has “5% of nationally representative individuals since 1999.”
Back in August, ResiClub emailed both NAR and the New York Fed to get their thoughts on the first-time homebuyer data divergence. See their response below 👇
“The Federal Reserve is basing their data on credit data. The Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers [from NAR] is based on a survey of those who purchased a primary residence home in the last year. Thus, the NAR survey includes the 9% of first-time buyers who paid cash for their home and did not finance their purchase. Excluded are first-time buyers who purchased a vacation home or mom-and-pop rental as their first purchase. A trend which has popularized as young adults are unable to achieve homeownership in the expensive areas they may live in. The NAR data collection is mid 2023 to mid 2024 vs a calendar year. Lastly, NAR uses medians as a measure of central tendency vs average.”
“We can’t tell you how the NAR annual survey was constructed, but in our previous blog, we wrote about a comparison between our data and NAR source.
Here are some of the unsophisticated differences.
1. New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel is a panel of credit report data where we follow 5% of nationally representative individuals since 1999, and is not a survey. We are not subject to any low response rate issue of the respondents.
2. We identify first time home buyers when a mortgage account appears for the first time on the individual’s credit reports. If a home purchase was made without a mortgage (such as a cash purchase) then we don’t see them, and not included in calculating the statistics.”
My takeaway? I’m going to take this particular first-time homebuyer data—especially the NAR series—with a grain of salt going forward. Instead, I’ll lean more on generational homeownership rates by age. And when you look at those figures, they clearly confirm that younger generations are entering homeownership more slowly than their older peers.
Today, ResiClub messaged Apartment List to get their latest calculation. See below 👇
Apartment List’s analysis shows that with each successive generation, homeownership rates take longer to ramp up. This pattern isn’t unique to Gen Z—Baby Boomers were slower to reach key homeownership milestones than the Silent Generation, Gen X was slower than the Boomers, Millennials were slower than Gen X, and Gen Z is slower still.
The fact that each generation takes a little longer to enter homeownership—during both periods of “good” and “poor” housing affordability—suggests an underlying secular shift that isn’t just affordability driven. In my view, that secular shift comes down to, largely, lifestyle/cultural shifts.
With each new generation, Americans are spending more years in school, marrying later, having children later (and having fewer kids), and ultimately buying homes later. I call this phenomenon “lifestyle delays.”
Given how homeownership rates are calculated—the number of owner-occupied housing units divided by the total number of occupied housing units—it’s likely that the gradual slowdown in homeownership ramp-up by generation is actually understating the true drop-off.
In plain English, what do I mean? If someone in their 20s or 30s is still living with their parents, they technically aren’t counted as their own household and therefore aren’t included in the denominator. And when you look closely at the generational data (see the Apartment List analysis above), you’ll see that with each generation, Americans are taking longer to move out of their parents’ homes. If you adjust for this, the “real” homeownership rates by generation—something John Burns Research and Consulting has analyzed—you find that the generational homeownership drop-off is indeed larger than the headline data suggests.
BatchData President Ivo Draginov on turning housing data into market advantage
Speaking at ResiDay 2025 on November 7, BatchData president Ivo Draginov explained how housing stakeholders can use housing data and AI to make better decisions in 2026 and beyond.
Watch Draginov’s full ResiDay 2025 interview here.
Giant homebuilder PulteGroup is expanding into the Cincinnati market
Today, PulteGroup—a homebuilder ranked No. 229 on the Fortune 500—announced it’s moving into the Cincinnati metro area housing market. In Ohio, they’re already in Cleveland and Columbus.
"This strategic expansion into the growing Cincinnati area is a natural next step, having built market-leading businesses in other parts of the state… This expansion aligns with our goals of serving high demand, growing communities where our quality homes and customer focus can create long-term value for both residents and shareholders.”
CHART: 50 metro area housing markets with the biggest home price declines since their 2022 peak
The cut below looks at JUST the 250 largest metro area housing markets. With the month-over-month column, keep in mind this is NOT seasonally adjusted data—and we're currently passing through the seasonally soft window.
For deeper cuts, ResiClub PRO members should access the ResiClub Terminal.
