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What's the issue?
Home prices
How have housing prices changed since before the pandemic?
They're up 56% since February 2020, according to data from the National Association of Realtors.
Why has the price gone up?
There are too many buyers for too few homes. Several reasons explain the supply shortage, including a lag in home building, rising construction costs and high mortgage rates that discourage current homeowners from moving and giving up their lower rate.
After Hayley Currier and Tammy Kremer put in an offer on a house, they paced around the backyard of the apartment they shared, nerves jangling.
"We've done everything we can," Kremer said.
"And all we can do is be anxious at each other," Currier added, before laughing.
Currier and Kremer, both in their late 30s, are longtime friends who bonded over their mutual passions for open-water swimming, Jewish rituals and political organizing. They've lived together for the last nine months in a rental in Berkeley, Calif., along with one other roommate.
This shared home has given Currier what she calls "such a beautiful community and feeling of connection and home." It has also confirmed for her that she and Kremer would live well together for the long term.
The ideal arrangement, she says, is that "Tammy and I still have intertwined lives and lives that we get to build together, but just a little bit of private space also."
Perhaps a duplex, the two of them thought, or two units on the same plot of land. So in March, they started searching for a place to buy together.
The draws of co-buying
A significant number of Americans have done what Currier and Kremer are doing. Several housing industry reports from 2024 found that about 15% of homebuyers bought their home with a friend or relative.
Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at the real estate company Redfin, got wind of the growing interest in co-buying through stories from the company's agents. " We've heard of more buyers having to team up to be able to afford a home," she says. " This is a story that we've been hearing really for a long time because affordability just keeps getting worse and worse."
Part of the allure of co-buying is that, in an era of rising prices, two wallets are better than one. Home prices have risen more than 50% since 2020.
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"Five years ago, the median household would be able to buy a typical home with room to spare," says Kara Ng, a senior economist at the real estate marketplace company Zillow. "Now the median owner would need a $17,000 raise in order to afford a typical home, and that's assuming they already saved 20% down."
In some parts of the U.S., homeownership is even further out of reach. Ng says that in California, the median earner would need a six-figure raise.
California happens to be where Currier and Kremer were looking for a home. Like other co-buyers who spoke to NPR, Kremer couldn't afford to buy alone, at least not where she wants to live.
Though housing prices are steep for everyone, Kremer and Currier have an additional economic factor working against them: They're single.
"There is a couple's advantage where if you're one person shopping for a home, the amount of listings you can afford is relatively small," says Ng. "But the moment you partner with another person, it unlocks a whole lot of listings for you."
According to an analysis from Zillow, a couple in the U.S. earning the median income can afford nearly quadruple the number of listings as an individual buyer can. As Americans increasingly delay or forgo marriage, more and more prospective buyers are on the losing end of the couple's advantage.
Co-buying with a friend or relative is a work-around, allowing people to combine income and assets, especially in areas where the housing stock is mostly single-family homes. "If there were more duplexes or triplexes available, then people would have an easier entry point to be able to afford a home alone," Fairweather says. "But since single-family homes are often the only homes available and they tend to be maybe larger than what an individual might need, it makes more sense to team up with somebody."
Obstacles to co-buying
When Currier's mother, Sari Currier, first heard about her daughter's plan, she thought, "Oh, this sounds so bad."
"It's not something my generation did. You didn't buy property with someone else," she says.
Research backs her up. Surveys show that younger people are more likely to co-buy. Millennial homeowners were more likely to have purchased a home with one or more friends (14%) than Gen X homeowners (4%) or baby boomer homeowners (1%), according to a 2024 survey from the consumer finance company Bankrate. And a 2024 report from the insurance agency JW Surety Bonds found that 70% of Generation Z is willing to co-buy with a friend, the highest of any generation it surveyed.
Sari Currier understands that homeownership has become less far affordable for younger people. But she still had concerns about her daughter co-buying with a friend. Unlike married couples, friends don't have built-in legal protections for splitting property if they want to part ways.
So she wrote up a list of questions for her daughter and Kremer to discuss — more than two dozen. They include: If one person can't afford the property tax, is the other liable for the whole amount? If a problem inside one unit affects the other, who pays? What happens when one wants to sell the property?
Housing experts advise people who co-buy to put an agreement in writing, as Currier and Kremer have done. "Whether you're romantically involved or not romantically involved, you need to plan for those worst-case scenarios," Fairweather says. " You never know what's going to happen if one of you loses your job or one of you needs to move or you decide to break up."
Co-buying isn't all about money
Some people don't co-buy solely for financial reasons. They do it for companionship. A 2024 Zillow report found that many buyers chose this route because they didn't want to live alone.
That's also true for Kremer. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she'd lived on her own in a studio apartment. "There was something about having my own space that felt like this notion of adulthood, of having made it," she recalls. But she was lonely: " I missed the feeling of coming home to people, and I missed the feeling of sharing food and being in community."
That won't be a problem for her anymore. Though Currier and Kremer didn't get the house they bid on this summer, by September they had cause to celebrate. Their offer on another property — two units on one lot, with a shared yard — was accepted. Now, it's possible for them to turn a design idea they'd dreamed up into a reality: stringing tin cans between their units to talk to each other.
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