Mary Kate Ranii is searching for her first home but the 35-year-old has had to compete with corporate buyers, size up aging (and sometimes crumbling) homes and even assess flood risks.
The Homeownership Wall
Here’s how homeownership became a fading dream, and what it means for young Pittsburgh.
“I want to be close to my family, I want to be able to walk to a bus line, and I want to have two toilets,” said Ranii, a program officer for a local philanthropy. “And apparently that’s a really steep lift.”
A confluence of challenges is keeping 30-somethings like Ranii from buying their first homes in the Pittsburgh area and across the country.
“We’re trying to start a family and we really don’t want to be doing that in an apartment where you don’t have control over what’s going on,” Ranii said. In her past apartments, she said fire and flooding from neighboring units forced her from her home on multiple occasions. “I’m not sure if that’s a place where we want to have a baby.”
Even with Pittsburgh’s relatively modest pricing, Ranii said she and her partner only felt financially ready to start house-hunting in the past year. “It was impossible with student loans” to contemplate it much earlier in their lives, she said.
38
The median age of first-time homebuyers in the U.S. last year
Ranii is emblematic of an emerging trend in Pittsburgh and across the country: Homeownership is slipping further and further out of reach for many, and even becoming harder for people in the nation’s upper-middle class. And in Pittsburgh, nationally renowned for its affordability, there are more roadblocks than ever in the homebuying process.
Numerous factors have worked across the country, including here, to push the median age of first-time homebuyers in the United States up to a record-high 38, a decade above the 1991 benchmark. A Pittsburgh’s Public Source dive into the change identifies causes including:
- Increasing student loan debt that makes mortgages harder to get
- Home prices and other costs rising faster than wages
- Corporations using technology to compete with individual buyers.
According to research from the National Association of Realtors, the median first-home age was stable between 30 and 33 for two decades before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jeff Philibin, a Lawrenceville resident who has worked as a loan officer since 1989, said he’s seen the shift firsthand.
In the past, “[At age] 23, 24, 25, kids literally got out of college, got themselves established and wanted to buy a house,” Philibin said. “Now I have two kids myself, 26 and 32, and neither one of them is even thinking of buying a house.
“By my measure, 30 is what 24 or 25 used to be. Now I see more people with a three in front than a two.”
Dale Swanton, a real estate agent and the president-elect of the Realtors Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh, added: “The ones that are younger, they tend to be getting help from mom and dad.”
Throughout October, Public Source will report on the barriers to homeownership in the Pittsburgh area and what they mean for how residents live, take care of their neighborhoods and build lasting stability.
Corporate competitors
Local academics and real estate professionals said part of the challenge for younger families is that they’re no longer competing only against other young families for starter homes. Since 2019, Pittsburgh buyers have increasingly had to go up against out-of-town corporations that buy properties in large numbers, either to rent or sell. Those buyers tend to make all-cash offers with no contingencies, making them tough to beat.
A 2024 report from University of Pittsburgh researchers Sabina Deitrick and Christopher Briem showed 12% of Pittsburgh’s single-family residential parcels were owned by corporations, or about 8,500 out of 71,000.
How does Pittsburgh have 20,000 vacant homes — and a housing shortage?
Across Allegheny County, five companies owned a combined 1,378 single-family homes as of late 2023, the researchers found, and the vast majority of corporate purchases were made in 2019 or later — aligning with a considerable rise in home prices and the nationwide trend of older first-time buyers.
Deitrick said the corporate buyers are mostly acquiring houses priced within the typical range of first-time buyers.
“We’re not talking about $800,000 or $1.2 million houses. We’re talking $250,000 in Bethel Park or Monroeville or Penn Hills,” Deitrick said.
She said the practice works against individual buyers twice: Outbidding them on individual homes and raising the prices in the market generally. “Once you start reducing the number of houses like that … the price is going to go up on others,” she said.
Ranii said she has run into corporate buyers and so-called flips along the way.
“There was one right at the beginning of the homebuying process we wanted to buy and now it’s being rented out,” she said.
“You go into a house [for a tour] and you can tell it’s been a flip. You lean on the counter, the counter moves. But they’re still charging really high prices.”
Joseph Paetz, a 29-year-old electrical engineer who is in the process of trying to buy his first home, said he went to an open house this year in Highland Park for a house well out of his price range and heard the agent mention “a California investor client” who renovated the house.
A listing on Zillow shows that house bears some of the now-familiar hallmarks of a flip: all-white walls and furniture in “millennial gray.” The website indicates the house is contingent, meaning a buyer’s offer has been accepted.
The county’s real estate records show the house was sold by an individual to Remedy Redevelopment LLC in 2023 for $305,000 — a tidy profit for the individual after 21 years of ownership. A year later, it was passed to WNC Holdings LLC, which has a California address, for a nominal $10 — typical of a sale between entities that are linked to one another.
The asking price listed on Zillow today: $699,900, more than twice what the corporation paid two years ago.
The experience angered Paetz, especially after nearly landing a more affordable Stanton Heights home, only to lose to an all-cash offer.
“My partner and I both want to make a life in Pittsburgh,” he said. “The Stanton Heights house is about a five-minute walk from the local school. We want to settle down, have a house, have kids, and do things like walk our kids to the neighborhood school. It’s hard when that feels so out of reach and it feels like we have to make so many compromises to make it happen.
“It’s especially frustrating when it seems like people buying houses likely are a corporation or someone who’s in it to make some extra money and not someone who wants to be a part of the community and make Pittsburgh a nice place to live.”
Prices and debt rising
Ranii has been paying off student loan debt since she graduated in 2012, and her partner is in the process of earning a graduate degree.
Student loans factor into lenders’ decisions on whether and how much a person can borrow on a mortgage. The more student debt a person has outstanding, the less house they are able to finance, Philibin said.
“The ones who had to borrow their way through school, that is a big rock on their back,” Philibin said. “If you get out and you’re in social services or a new nurse, and you pay $800 per month for your student loans — oof.”
Increases in Pittsburgh, 2020-23
Federal Reserve’s house price index
29%
Median household income
15%
Because interest rates are higher on student loans than mortgages, “If you have $50,000 worth of student loan debt, it might be taking $90,000 out of what you can pay for a house,” Philibin said. “At some point it’s easier to rent than live in a shack.”
Sarah Slater, a medical research administrative worker who rents in Garfield, said she has $25,000 left in student loan debt — part of the reason she feels homeownership is at least five years away for her. She said interest rates, which in 2022 hit their highest levels since before the Great Recession, didn’t help.
“The cost of housing is going up way, way faster than wages,” explained Jackie Smith, a Pitt sociology professor who studies housing policy.
The Federal Reserve’s house price index for Pittsburgh rose about 29% between 2020 and 2023, while Fed data shows median household income in the city grew just 15%.
Richard Snipe, the director of the Pittsburgh Housing Development Corporation, said growing construction costs are making both old and newly built housing more expensive. His organization is an arm of the Urban Redevelopment Authority and works to provide affordable homeownership opportunities in Pittsburgh.
“Ever since the pandemic, the cost of construction is almost double,” Snipe said. “What hasn’t doubled is wages.”
He added that the higher cost of materials combined with increased risk of natural disaster like flooding has resulted in large increases in home insurance premiums. CNBC reported this year that Pennsylvania has seen among the highest hikes in the country, with annual homeowners insurance costs rising 44% from 2021 to 2024.
Uncertain times, uncertain homes
Higher uncertainty in the national and global economy means fewer people eager to jump into homeownership, Deitrick said.
The president’s tariffs are roiling global trade and raising prices on certain products. The average interest rate on a 30-year mortgage is around 6.3%. The job market has slowed, worrying some economists that a recession could be in the country’s future.
“I’ve had a couple of buyers tell me this year that they wanted to put their search on hold because they were concerned about losing their job next year,” Swanton said.
Two of the region’s biggest employers in the city’s “eds and meds” economy, Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, are facing the loss of grant funding and a slowdown in international student enrollments stemming from Trump administration policies, putting jobs at risk that once formed the foundation of the city’s 21st-century renewal.
Climate change is also a consideration for some, and increased flooding in recent years raises new questions about buying in the region’s rivertowns.
For Ranii, achieving her goal of buying near her family could mean ending up in the Allegheny River-adjacent communities of Millvale, Etna or Sharpsburg. “Places that I really like and have great business districts and are close to transit, but they’re really low-lying and they have really high flood risks … I can’t buy a house that is just going to float away.”
Pittsburgh’s aging housing stock brings an added layer of uncertainty to the buying process.
Nationwide, 11% of housing units were built before 1940, according to Census Bureau estimates. In Pittsburgh, the share is 47% — more than four times the national rate.
“Pittsburgh houses are very old, and your maintenance budget here has to be bigger than in other markets,” said Julie Block, a local real estate agent since 2016.
Percentage of housing units built before 1940
Pittsburgh
47%
United States
11%
Pat and Regina Schober, a couple in their 30s who work in digital marketing, said this made it tricky to find their first home earlier this year.
“In our budget, there were a lot of places we could afford but there were not a ton of places … that we really loved that wouldn’t need $20,000 of work right away,” Schober said. “You have to figure out what kind of issues are you willing to tolerate.”
They settled on an Observatory Hill home for $247,000. “We had a lot of options but they really came down to what kind of sacrifices were we willing to make?” Pat Schober said. Their new home needed some roof repairs that had to be negotiated with the sellers.
Paetz and his partner eventually had an offer accepted on a house in the South Side Slopes — not where they envisioned settling, but a place they think they will feel comfortable. He said he thinks the bidding on the home was less competitive because it’s a “weird-looking house” with “ugly” pictures on Zillow, built more than a century ago with add-ons from various eras. But the couple likes the natural light and the yard.
“It’s an old house that’s been conglomerated on a zillion times so it’s a little risky in that regard,” Paetz said.
The cost of fewer homeowners
Homeownership is one of the primary ways Americans build generational wealth, and gives people not only stable housing costs in perpetuity but an asset that will likely appreciate over the years.
Crystal Jennings-Rivera, the director of stewardship and community engagement at the City of Bridges Community Land Trust, said rising rent is one of the main factors driving people to seek her organization’s affordable homeownership opportunities.
“There’s no cap on rent,” she said. “Everybody’s going up, and it becomes no longer affordable for them and I see them jump my way.”
The land trust acquires houses, rehabilitates them and sells them to people earning under 80% of the area’s median income.
The greatest consequence of intensifying homeownership hurdles could be in the fabric of city neighborhoods. As more and more homes are operated as rentals, fewer residents feel the commitment that comes with owner-occupancy, said Snipe.
“It’s going to lead to instability in some neighborhoods,” he said. “If you own a home, you’re not quick to think about moving. … If you’re a tenant, if there’s a rash of car break-ins in your neighborhood you’re going to say, ‘I’m moving.’ If you’re a homeowner, you’re going to form a block watch, you’re going to invest in cameras and you’re going to protect your investment.”
Philibin, who lives in Lawrenceville, said three units on his block are owned by corporations and vacant, and he’s worried about their upkeep.
“I think [an individual] homebuyer puts time and effort into making it a great home,” Philibin said. “The investor, ‘sufficient’ is the word. Can I get the rent and not get any calls?”
Charlie Wolfson is the local government reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Sarah Liez.
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