Why Single Women Outpace Single Men in Home Buying
According to a recent New York Times article, nearly twice as many single women buy homes as single men. In fact, since 1994 women home buyers have been making up more than one-third of the total growth in the home buying market and more than one in five is a single woman.
What’s fueling the trend?
In 2006, the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard calculated the value of home purchases by single women buyers over a three-year period at $550 billion. Which underscores my point – single women are pursuing homeownership much more aggressively than their male counterparts – but why?
Mom’s the Breadwinner
In a recent Pew Research Center study, it turns out, women are the primary breadwinners, accounting for a record 40% of American households with children and roughly two-thirds of these female breadwinners are single.
Single Women Aren’t Afraid to Ask for Help
Experts say single women are more inclined than single men to work towards fully understanding the home buying process. That need to understand drives them to reach out and ask for assistance or information. When they do, they often look to a home buying advocate or expert (like the brokers here at Lee Davies Real Estate) who are only too happy to advise them, which in turn results in an expedited buying process.
Women Have Better Credit
According to one of the big three credit bureaus (Experian), women on average, seem to handle their credit more responsibly than men. This is in spite of the fact that the average salary for a woman is still behind a man’s (to the tune of 77 cents for every dollar). In fact, Experian reports that men have a 7% higher incidence of late mortgage payments and 4.3% more debt than women.
Women are Better Educated
According to the US Census Bureau for the first time in American history, there were a million more female college graduates than male. That’s a perfect reversal from the stats the bureau obtained in 2000. And Forbes magazine reports that these educated women are, “beginning to pour into management and professional occupations that require more education and offer higher pay and status.” Even going so far as to “dominate some of the jobs that used to belong to men.”
Bottom Line
Whether single or not, women drive the market, making the majority of buying decisions. Which is why if you’re a seller looking to put your house on the market, preparing and staging your house to appeal to the female buyer is more important than ever before. Clean windows, clean lines, warm neutral colors and other touches that help to present your home as well maintained and much loved, enable the more discriminating female buyers (or any buyer for that matter) to picture themselves, making a “home” they can be proud of.