A narrative gets debunked. The affordability crisis remains.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) claimed in its annual report on homebuyers, based on survey results, that the typical age of first-time buyers (FTBs) had spiked to 40 years in 2025, up from 37.9 years in 2024, and up from 33 years in 2021. This spike in the age of first-time buyers caused a lot of handwringing and heavy breathing in the media and social media.
But the New York Fed, based on its Consumer Credit Panel/Equifax (CCP) data, has debunked this narrative of the surging age of first-time buyers. In August, it released a report with data through 2024.
And I reported on it, republishing the charts from the NY Fed, and I summarized:
“The average age of first-time home buyers has essentially not changed since 2012, and compared to the early 2000s, it has declined marginally.”
Now, Edward J. Pinto and Joseph S. Tracy at the AEI Housing Center have published a new report with updated CCP data from the NY Fed through 2025 (they thanked economic research advisor at the NY Fed, Donghoon Lee, for his assistance in updating the NY Fed’s data analysis). And they compared the NAR’s data and methods to the NY Fed’s data and methods:
Per the New York Fed’s CCP, the average age of first-time buyers edged down in 2025 to 36.2 years and remains roughly unchanged since 2009, and lower than in 2008 and prior years (red line in the chart).
Per NAR, the typical age in 2025 spiked to 40 years, from 33 years in 2021, 32 years in 2018, and 31 years in 2015… a stunning nine-year increase in a decade (blue in the chart):
Why the difference? Who is closer to accurate?
The AEI’s Pinto and Tracy dig into the methods. From their report:
“NAR’s statistics are based on their annual survey of homebuyers and sellers. For the 2025 report, covering from July 2024 to June 2025, 189,750 surveys were mailed to a ‘representative sample’ of buyers and sellers. However, only 6,103 completed surveys were received, indicating a response rate of just 3.5%, with only 21%, or 1,281, being FTBs.
“The [NY Fed’s] CCP, by contrast, is based on a 5% random sample of all credit reports, which reports provide both borrower age and home buying history.”
And they add:
“Digging deeper into the NAR and CCP results yields helpful distributions by age bins. While both have nearly identical shares for age 35-44, the NAR’s under age 35 groups are underrepresented by 17 percentage points and the aged 45 to 74 buyers are overrepresented by 18 percentage points respectively, compared to the CCP.
“The NAR bias to a higher age is perhaps not surprising given that it is a mail survey with 120 questions, which doesn’t lend itself to a high response rate by Millennials and GenZ-ers.
“The CCP data appears to offer a better historical view of the current position of FTBs.”
But the affordability crisis remains.
Today’s first-time buyers face a huge affordability crisis in the US housing market, driven by the home price explosion from mid-2020 to mid-2022, of over 40% on average, and in many markets of 50%, 60%, or even 70% in just a couple of years, which was completely nuts.
In many of those markets, home prices have been skidding lower since then: Here are 14 bigger markets where single-family home prices have already sunk by 10% to 25%, and 24 bigger markets where condo prices have sunk by 12% to 29%. These lower prices, along with rising wages, are the market’s solution, and it has begun to whittle away at the affordability crisis.
But in other markets, prices have continued to rise, though at a slower pace, thereby still worsening the affordability crisis.
There is a solution to this affordability crisis – and it isn’t lower mortgage rates, which are in a historically normal range, given where inflation is. My analysis and why this mess happened: Mortgage Rates Are Not Too High. What’s too High Are Home Prices that Exploded by 40-70% in 2 Years, Creating the “Affordability Crisis”
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Might the fact that some measures say that if you have not bought a home in say 5 years, you are considered a “new” home buyer?