real estate Unmarried women are striving to buy homes
After a lifetime of living paycheck to paycheck as a single mom,
"It didn't make sense to continue to pay
It was anything but easy. The mother of two grown children got outbid on more than 10 homes as
She soon got priced out of her target market in Eastvale, then in
If she succeeds in getting her new home, Wolfe will become one of the latest in a long line of unmarried female homebuyers who have been outperferforming their male counterparts in getting their piece of the American dream.
Homebuyer surveys conducted by the
Realtors released their latest homebuyers survey on
Single women "are an absolute force" in the housing market, said
"Women have been second only to married couples as far back as we have tracked it, which is impressive considering until the 1970s women needed a co-signer for a credit card," Lautz said.
Although single women traditionally have lower incomes than single men, survey responses show they're more willing to cut personal expenses to save for a home, she said.
"Women are historically more likely to believe their home is a better financial investment than stocks compared to men," Lautz said. "They'll know what their (house) payment is oing to be for the next 30 years. That's incredibly important to women."
Delaying marriage
NAR received 5,795 responses from primary residence buyers who bought a home between
The homebuyer survey was conducted periodically 11 times until 2003 and annually since 2004.
Married couples have accounted for the lion's share of homebuying all 40 years since the survey began, although their share fell from a high of 81% in 1985 to 60% this year.
The share of homes bought by single men also has changed little over the four-decade period and never got over 12%.
Agents interviewed recently speculated that single women are more nurturing, more likely to value the investment value of homeownership or more likely to be raising children.
"Because of the nurturing aspect and the need to take care of family, we realize there are things that need to be done to create more stability," said
"I always wanted a house," West said. "Yes, you do it when you get married. But I wasn't going to wait."
"They're single longer, so they buy before they get married," said Cimetta, an agent with Vista Sotheby's
Demographic clues
Simple demographics provide some clues as to why more single homebuyers are women. For one thing, there are more of them.
Single women made up just over 25% of the
But that's a gap of less than 3 percentage points, compared with this year's homebuying gap of 10 percentage points.
Two other sets of statistics are far more telling: single women are more likely to be raising children than single men, and widows far outnumber widowers. By a three-to-one margin, single women with children outnumber single men and widows outnumber widowers.
One census report shows 76% of single-parent households are headed by women, while 24% are headed by men.
"Households with children are more likely to become homeowners," said an
Another factor is women tend to outlive their spouses more often than men, creating a larger pool of buyers with past homeownership experience.
Local real estate agents say single buyers of both genders are rarer in
"I have not seen one single buyer - single woman or single man," said
Decade of planning
A divorced mother who raised her son and two daughters on her own, Motta lived in several
The paralegal first started thinking about buying a home in the early 2000s. She was tired of not being free to do what she wanted in her home. And almost all of her co-workers were homeowners.
In 2010, she attended a homebuying seminar taught by local agents. After class, she stuck around for an hour to run her credit to see if she qualified. She did not, but she shouldn't let that deter her, said the agent, who gave her a list of things to work on.
"He said, ‘You have to be hungry for the house, decide what you want and stick with it,'" Motta said.
Over the next five years, she worked on improving her credit score and studied the market. By
"I was like a unicorn because that was uncommon for a single woman with children to be looking for a home," Motta said.
Wolfe, the
But the market changed so fast in the 16 months she spent house hunting, and the struggles to win a bid or close her one escrow in
The idea of leaving
"By the time I fell out of escrow in July, there was nothing on the market (I could afford). Everything was going in the
Wolfe considered moving to
Her bid was accepted. Wolfe will move into her new home with one of her daughters if the escrow closes as planned.
"I'm keeping my fingers crossed nothing comes up to block the Vegas purchase," Wolfe said. "It's been my dream (to own a home) my whole life."
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