Dive Brief:

• If you compare apples with apples, it turns out that first-time home buyers nearly make up  their historical average share of all families buying homes.
• But young people clearly have much more student debt than used to be the case and the portion of 25 to 35-year-olds who own homes is down 15% since 2005.
• Confused as to how those facts jibe? Institutional buyers are taking up big pieces of the home-sale market, and those companies do not show up in the number of households buying for the first time.

Dive Insight:

The fact is that a much smaller number of young people can buy homes because they cannot take on more debt, but a smaller number of people – as opposed to institutions – are among home purchasers. Because of two changes happening together, the number of young home buyers has taken a hard hit from student debt, but their share of people buying homes is almost unchanged.