Your parents probably told you the same thing every parent tells their kid: work hard, save your money, and buy a house. So you did. You got the degree, landed the job, started putting money aside. Then you went house hunting and found yourself competing against buyers who didn’t need a mortgage at all. Some of those buyers were your parents’ age. Some of them were your actual parents.
Baby boomers have reclaimed their position as the largest group of home buyers in the United States. According to the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report, boomers made up 42 percent of all home purchases in the past year.
Millennials, who held the top spot just one year earlier at 38 percent, dropped to 29 percent. But the headline number isn’t what makes this interesting. It’s what’s happening inside families — at kitchen tables, on phone calls, during holidays — when the generation that preached homeownership is thriving in a market their own kids can barely enter.
One Writes a Check. The Other Needs a Loan
Half of older boomers and 40 percent of younger boomers purchased their homes entirely in cash, according to the same NAR report. No mortgage, no financing, no waiting on bank approval. On the other end, one in three younger millennials needed a financial gift or loan from a relative just to cover a down payment. Over 90 percent of buyers under 44 required financing.
Picture it: a 34-year-old puts in an offer on a starter home with a pre-approval letter and a prayer. A 68-year-old puts in a cash offer with no contingencies and a two-week close. Same house. Same listing. Only one of them gets the call back.
Same families. Same country. Very different paths to the front door.
The wealth gap behind the numbers
The reason boomers can buy with cash isn’t a mystery. It’s timing, equity, and math.
Baby boomers hold more than $85 trillion in total assets, according to Federal Reserve data — including roughly $19 trillion in home equity alone. They bought homes during a period when prices were far more affordable relative to wages. In 2000, the typical home cost about 2.9 times the median household income. By 2021, that ratio had climbed to nearly four times income. For context, that’s the difference between stretching to afford a mortgage and not qualifying for one at all.
Home values surged during the pandemic — rising from roughly $245,000 in early 2020 to around $357,000 by early 2025, according to Zillow. If you already owned a home, you watched your net worth climb from the couch. If you were still renting and saving, you watched the finish line move further away every quarter.
Gen Z, despite representing a similar share of the population, holds approximately $6 trillion in total wealth. Millennials sit at about $18 trillion. The gap is enormous, and housing is one of the biggest reasons why.
First-time buyers are disappearing
The share of first-time home buyers in the U.S. dropped to a record low of 21 percent, according to NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. Before the 2008 financial crisis, that number was 40 percent. Cut in half in less than two decades.
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The median age of a first-time buyer has risen to 40 years old, per NAR — up from 28 in 1991. Other sources tell a slightly different story: Redfin places the median closer to 35, while the Mortgage Bankers Association puts it at 32 to 33 using millions of mortgage records. The methodologies differ, but every source agrees on the direction — Americans are buying later, if they buy at all.
Think about what that shift looks like in real life. A generation ago, you bought your first home around the time you got married or had your first kid. Today, you might be buying your first home around the time your kid starts middle school.
Every year that purchase gets delayed is a year of home equity that doesn’t get built. And that’s exactly the kind of equity that gives boomers their cash advantage today.
Why boomers dominate — and why it’s complicated
It’s worth understanding why boomers surged back to the top, because this isn’t simply a story of one generation hoarding resources.
Many boomers are downsizing — selling larger family homes they’ve owned for 15 or 20 years and moving closer to family or into retirement. They made up 53 percent of all sellers in the past year, and the equity from those sales funds their cash purchases.
That’s rational behavior at their life stage. But when a cash buyer competes against a financed buyer, the cash buyer almost always wins. Sellers prefer the certainty, the faster close, and the absence of appraisal contingencies. The result is a market where existing wealth creates an advantage that income alone can’t overcome.
Investors have added to the pressure too, claiming roughly 30 percent of single-family home purchases nationally in 2025. And conditions vary by region — some markets remain relatively affordable while others have priced out all but the wealthiest buyers.
The feedback loop
What makes the generational housing gap so persistent is that it feeds on itself. Boomers own more property, which generates more equity, which funds more cash purchases, which drives up prices, which pushes younger buyers further out.
At age 30, only about 43 percent of millennials owned homes, compared to 52 percent of boomers at the same age. That gap has narrowed as millennials enter their late thirties, suggesting homeownership for this generation has been delayed rather than denied. But delayed homeownership means delayed wealth-building — and that’s a gap that compounds over time.
What the data actually tells us
Nobody in this story is a villain. Boomers didn’t break the housing market on purpose. They bought when conditions were favorable, held on through decades of appreciation, and are now using that wealth in retirement. Most of us would do the same. And plenty of boomer parents are genuinely trying to help — that’s where a lot of those down payment gifts are coming from.
But the collective outcome is a market that looks nothing like the one previous generations grew up in. Parents are funding their own children’s down payments while simultaneously being the reason those down payments need to be so large. Sunday dinners where Mom and Dad offer to help with the house hunt are also Sunday dinners where Mom and Dad’s generation is the reason the house costs what it does.
That’s not an accusation. It’s just where the numbers have led us. And for millions of younger Americans scrolling through listings they can’t afford from apartments they’re outgrowing, those numbers hit a little different when the call for help goes to the same generation that’s winning the bidding war.
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