If you picture a first-time homebuyer in the Seattle area, you probably wouldn’t think of 24-year-old Edwin Nino Delgado with his hip-hop posters taped to the wall of his $770,000 Lake City triplex.
He’s nowhere near the age of the typical first-time homebuyer, which is now a record high of 40 nationwide, according to the National Realtors Association. He is also part of a shrinking age group of Seattle-area homeowners.
Saddled by student debt and high rents, many young people are locked out of the Seattle area’s pricey housing market, where median prices hover close to $1 million. Just under 4% of homeowner households in King County were headed by someone under 30 in 2023, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau data — a marked difference from nearly 11% in the 1980s.
And yet some are making it happen — and it’s not always with the help of their generous families.
Instead, some Gen Z homeowners say they are sacrificing their “fun years” and parts of their dreams to purchase a home while they’re young. Some started planning in their teen years, saving aggressively, finding ways to reduce tuition and pursuing high-paying jobs.
“It’s definitely not been easy,” Nino Delgado said. “This isn’t something I just thought of for the past couple months.”
He has been shaping his life around buying a home young ever since he was a teenager.
At the time, Nino Delgado spent his summers mowing lawns in Gig Harbor and Tacoma for his parents’ landscaping business. Many of the properties had one owner: a woman who lived in the nicest home of them all. Each time he rolled his mower toward her house, he perceived the benefits of real estate investment — financial security and, eventually, generational wealth.
He came up with a plan.
During the pandemic, he taught himself to code and studied real estate investment strategies. To avoid accruing student debt, he exclusively looked at in-state schools and poured himself into applying for scholarships and financial aid. And after graduating from the University of Washington with a computer science degree, he quickly landed a tech job in Seattle.
This fall, just after his 24th birthday, he purchased the triplex with tenants to help him pay his lofty mortgage payments.
His living situation isn’t ideal. He’s sharing his home with others. There’s a hole in the ceiling. The upstairs needs renovating. But the property is the first step toward the future he envisioned for himself while mowing lawns.
“In another life, I would have been a musician,” he said from his new home office, decorated with album covers, set lists and records. “But if I had done that, I would not be owning a house. Sacrifices were made.”
The American dream on life support
Squeezed between student loans and soaring housing costs, Gen Z is feeling left behind and confused about how to catch up to the homeownership milestones of past generations.
“Is the American dream of homeownership dead? I won’t say it’s dead, but it is on life support,” said Seattle-based real estate economist Matthew Gardner. “People are having to take that much longer to save up to buy a home.”
In the 1980s, the typical first-time homebuyer was in their late 20s.
Since then, more young people have become weighed down with debt due to the costs of college tuition. Around a third of people between the ages of 18 and 29 hold student loans, compared with 17% of the total population, according to FICO. That’s hurting young consumers’ credit and making it harder to secure mortgages.
At the same time, America didn’t build enough homes to keep up with growing demand, causing home prices to soar. According to census data, the median home in King County in 1980 was $71,400, which is now equivalent to about $300,000 adjusted for inflation. In 2025, the median price of a single-family home in King County is more than three times that, at $990,000.
Although first-time homebuyer programs allow for small down payments to get people into the market, many Seattle-area Gen Zers say they cannot afford monthly mortgage payments with a small down payment — even for more affordable homes. Instead, they’re waiting until they can save close to a 20% down payment, which is often over $100,000.
That traps Gen Zers in the rental market longer, losing money they could be paying toward owning, Gardner said. King County’s high rents can push off homeownership even further, while home prices rise.
In 2023, households headed by people under 30 in King County were overwhelmingly renters — about three-quarters of them, according to census data. Just 14% owned their homes, down from 26% in 1980.
someone under 30 is shrinking as more young people are stuck renting due to housing costs and student debt.
In the past decade, King County’s average apartment rents have risen nearly 57% to $2,146, according to The Washington Center for Real Estate Research, while median home prices have more than doubled.
High rents are eating away at young people’s savings, said Windermere principal economist Jeff Tucker, and pushing traditional milestones like buying a house and having children further down the line.
“This problem has just really come to a head, and today’s young people are paying the price for it,” Tucker said.
If people can get into the market a decade earlier than the median first-time homebuyer, that can make a huge difference in their lives down the road. They can stabilize their payments sooner and pay off their home at 60 instead of 70.
That’s easier said than done. The supply of affordable homes in the Seattle area is low, forcing young people to compete with one another.
“We’re viewing homes as a scarce resource, like original baseball cards,” Tucker said. “But houses shouldn’t be like that.”
Not-so-roaring 20s
Joshua and Madison Crossen, both 26, are a rare sight in 2025 — more like a 1950s billboard ad for a new suburban neighborhood. A babbling baby and a rosy-cheeked toddler run around their blue ranch house in Auburn until their afternoon nap time. When they aren’t wrangling their children, the husband and wife run a pest control business.
In both of their childhood homes, buying young wasn’t the exception — it was the standard.
“That’s what my grandpa did. That’s what my dad did. That’s what you do,” Joshua said.
But as teenage sweethearts, Joshua and Madison quickly realized to do so they’d need to plan their futures around buying a home. There was simply no way they could do what most of their classmates planned to do — move out, pay rent, attend college away from home and focus only on school.
Instead, they attended community college, lived at home and worked 60 to 80 hours a week for a sewage department and catering company. After graduation, they continued working multiple jobs — including remote tech jobs for Joshua and medical internships for Madison.
After living with their parents for free until age 22 and saving every penny they earned, they amassed almost $100,000 — enough to put 17% down on a home near their family.
Giving up a looser, more carefree early 20s was worth it, they said. Buying a home was always the priority — it had to be if they wanted their kids to one day run around a yard the way they once did.
Joshua and Madison aren’t alone. According to a Bank of America survey, 30% of Gen Z homeowners reported in 2025 that they paid for their down payment by taking on an extra job, compared with 28% in 2024 and 24% in 2023.
The couple is proud that they achieved what their parents did at their age. But having to work overtime and save scrupulously has made others feel jaded.
“I just believe so firmly that everybody should have the opportunity to have a level of security. … I’m almost incredulous that it has become so hard,” said Maria Buchanan, 28.
At age 25, Buchanan purchased her home with her fiancé in Tacoma, an hour away from their construction jobs in Seattle, where homes were out of their price range. To afford a down payment, it took them years of living on just one of their two incomes to save, sharing one beat-up 2013 Prius and saying “no to experiences,” like traveling and eating out.
“I just think it shouldn’t take what it took for us. We’re really financially careful people, and people think what we had to do was overkill when it was the bare minimum to purchase a home,” she said.
Buchanan hears stories of her parents having adventures and finding themselves in their 20s, while she was forced to put all her energy and savings just to achieve the same thing.
“It feels like, as a generation, we have lost the privilege of making mistakes,” she said.
Unconventional means
An 8-year-old Alayna Hooper felt her world turn upside down as her parents’ car rolled over and her head slammed against the interior, the precursor to years of hospital trips. In that moment of pain and fear, Hooper had no idea the $80,000 settlement from that car accident would allow her to purchase a home in her Seattle neighborhood at 23.
“I feel like if that hadn’t happened, I don’t think I’d be a homeowner,” she said. “We are lucky. It’s so rare.”
Technically, Hooper’s settlement could be described as a gift from her family, even though the payout was mostly due to her injuries. But it showcases that ordinary methods of saving often aren’t enough for young people to become homeowners in the Seattle area.
Hooper is an operating room nurse making a decent salary, but she still needed her mother to co-sign on her house. She’s part of a rising group of young homebuyers who are buying with the help of family and friends.
The Bank of America survey found 21% of Gen Z prospective homebuyers say they plan to pay for their down payment with a loan from parents or family, compared to just 15% of the general population who say the same. Of Gen Z homeowners surveyed, 22% reported that they purchased their home with siblings in 2025 compared with 12% in 2024 and 4% in 2023.
Inheritances are also a common way people are buying homes in their 20s in the Seattle area, real estate agent Candace Hagen said. That can make the buying process a lot more emotional, but Hagen tries to help them through it.
“I tell them ‘you should feel so proud of yourself and what you’re doing,’” she said.
To purchase her Seattle home, Donna Huang, a 29-year-old senior marketing manager, combined a $50,000 inheritance from her grandmother with the profit from selling the Minneapolis condo she bought in her early 20s.
Despite her successful career, she needed both of those sources of cash to put down 20% on a home in Seattle. She felt mixed emotions about using her inheritance, she said.
“The process itself was a little bit daunting,” she said. “It did make me feel … almost guilty and anxious.”
Out of place
There’s an unsaid part of being an unusually young homeowner — a feeling of awkwardness.
Some say they feel uneasy portraying their homeownership as an achievement, knowing that they have something their peers may never achieve and that their future wealth depends on homes growing even more out of reach for many.
That’s why Huang didn’t throw a housewarming party when she bought her home.
“I felt like I wanted to be mindful of not coming off as bragging. I do empathize with how difficult it is,” she said.
Homeowners in their 20s have friends who are still living at home, racking up student debt in postgraduate school or struggling with low-paying jobs. But they’re also living in neighborhoods where they’re closer in age to the children or grandchildren of their neighbors.
“I am definitely the youngest one on the block,” Hooper said.
There’s sometimes a social divide between Gen Z homeowners and their peers, they say. While many renters move frequently and live closer to bustling city centers, Gen Z homeowners often find themselves farther out and living more anchored, responsibility-heavy lives.
Nino Delgado often sees friends who are going to expensive festivals or traveling around the world. Some are pursuing the sort of risky careers he once dreamed of for himself as a musician. He, meanwhile, is settled into his job and his new home.
“Any trip that I take is removing from (my mortgage),” he said.
But, to him, it’s all worth it. He is on his way to achieving his other dream — financial security.
“I have these financial goals for myself to carve out a better life for my family,” he said. “It forces me to think, ‘OK, I need to tie my boots and get to work.’ ”
Seattle Times columnist Gene Balk contributed to this story.
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