The real estate industry is spending a huge amount of time arguing about who should see a listing and when. It’s an important debate. Sellers deserve transparency and every reasonable opportunity to maximize their home’s value.Â
But we’ve spent very little time talking about the people who can’t buy a home at all. Whether a listing is marketed publicly or through a private strategy matters far less if the next generation can’t afford to make an offer in the first place.
According to NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, the share of first-time buyers dropped to 21%, the lowest since NAR began tracking in 1981, down from closer to 40% before the Great Recession—driven by high rents, student debt, and the difficulty of saving for a down payment.
I know this firsthand. In the late 1980s, my fiancée and I bought our first home using a non-qualifying assumption, paying the sellers their small amount of equity and assuming their loan. That home became the foundation for everything that followed.
Non-qualifying assumptions are a relic of a different era, but the principle isn’t. It creates more paths into homeownership, builds wealth, stabilizes neighborhoods, and produces the repeat buyers and sellers who keep the market moving. The question is what the modern equivalent of that door looks like.
American homeowners collectively hold roughly $34 trillion in home equity, and the typical homeowner’s net worth is about forty times a renter’s. The family that bought a home in the mid-nineties funded a retirement and helped a child through college. The family still renting today never got that clock started.
Homeownership has always been the most reliable on-ramp to the middle class for people without inherited wealth. That on-ramp is narrowing, and we’re debating the speed limit. So, let’s talk about what would help.
Unlock the inventory that’s already sitting on the market
One quiet contributor to the shortage is the capital gains tax structure that traps longtime homeowners in place. The exclusions on gain from a primary home sale, $250,000 for single filers and $500,000 for married couples, haven’t been updated since 1997, even as prices have risen dramatically.
The bipartisan More Homes on the Market Act would double those exclusions and index them to inflation, a long-overdue fix to a provision Congress wrote before the internet existed. Pass it and you create mobility. Mobility means inventory, and inventory is what first-time buyers need.
Build more, and faster
There is no path out of this crisis that doesn’t run through housing supply. NAR estimates a national shortage of 4.7 million homes. States like Montana, Washington, and Texas are leading with reforms that reduce parking minimums and permit more density in commercial corridors. It is the right direction, though zoning reform is slow and takes years to produce units at scale. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act would help by streamlining federal permitting delays. Supply and tax policy have to move together; neither alone closes the shortage.
Open the door without repeating 2008
The 2008 crisis wasn’t caused by helping the working families buy homes. It was caused by predatory products layered on unqualified borrowers. The lesson isn’t that homeownership should be harder to access, but that it should be accessible without manufacturing systemic risk.
The infrastructure already exists. Down Payment Resource counts thousands of active assistance programs that can cover an entire down payment, yet many qualified buyers have never heard of them. FHA loans, requiring as little as 3.5% down, remain the most accessible on-ramp for buyers without family wealth.
A federal first-generation homebuyer initiative with real scale, not another temporary subsidy but a durable program helping such families navigate financing responsibly, deserves consideration – paired with policies that increase supply, since stimulating demand without building more homes just pushes prices higher.
The conversation worth having
If we spend this season of industry attention arguing only about who controls the listing, and walk away without addressing who can’t afford the house in the first place, we’ll have used our platform on the wrong problem. Listing policy may influence how homes are marketed, but it doesn’t explain why millions of Americans can’t afford one. They’re losing out because homes they can afford aren’t being built fast enough, the tax code discourages existing owners from selling, and lending infrastructure doesn’t reach the people it was designed to serve.
History will not remember us for the listing debate. It will remember whether we fought just as hard for enough homes, and enough opportunity, so that the next generation is able to buy one.
