First-Time Buyer? Here’s Who’s Actually Buying in Washington Right Now

If it feels like buying your first home is taking longer than it used to for your parents’ generation, that’s not just a feeling — it’s the actual data. The national first-time buyer share has hit a record low of 21%, and the median age of a first-time buyer has been climbing toward 40. If you’re in your thirties and don’t yet own a home, you are, statistically, right on schedule for where the market actually is — not behind some outdated timeline.

The story behind the number

It’s easy to read “record low first-time buyer share” as bad news, and in some ways the underlying pressures — pricing, rates, down payment size — are genuinely harder than they were a generation ago. But there’s a permission-giving way to read this same data: the timeline you might be measuring yourself against, the one where people bought their first home at 28 or 30, isn’t the timeline most people are actually on anymore. The market changed. Your sense of “on track” should probably change with it.

A record-low first-time buyer share and a median age climbing toward 40 isn’t a sign that something’s wrong with you. It’s a sign the entire timeline shifted — for almost everyone, not just you.

Who’s actually buying right now

The buyers I work with who are purchasing their first home in their mid-to-late thirties, sometimes early forties, aren’t outliers. They’re a big and growing share of the market — people who’ve spent longer renting, longer saving, longer waiting for the right moment, and are now buying with more financial stability than a first-time buyer in their late twenties might have had a generation ago. That’s not a consolation prize. In a lot of cases, it’s a genuinely stronger position to buy from.

What this means for you

If you’ve been holding a quiet sense that you’re “behind,” it’s worth setting that against the actual data instead of an assumption about how things used to work. You’re not late. You’re buying in the market that actually exists right now, alongside a large and growing group of buyers doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same stage of life.

If you’re a first-time buyer anywhere in South King County and ready to find out where you actually stand — not where an outdated timeline says you should be — I’d be glad to talk it through with you. Reach out whenever you’re ready to start the conversation.