Category: Buying/Selling/Renting

A first-time buyer in Sunnyvale, California, earning the area median income faces a median home price well above $1 million. In Greenville, North Carolina, the sticker price is lower, but scraping together a 3% to 5% down payment on top of closing costs, inspections, and moving expenses can still feel like climbing a wall. Both…

A couple starting to save for their first home today, earning the national median income and setting aside money at the average American savings rate, will not have enough for a down payment until 2033. That is the core finding of a May 2025 analysis from Realtor.com: seven years of disciplined saving to reach a…

A one-bedroom apartment in Austin, Texas, that rented for $1,450 a month in the summer of 2023 can now be found for closer to $1,300, often with a month or two of free rent thrown in. Across the country, the story is similar in scale if not in specifics: after five years of relentless increases,…

For the first time in the history of federal housing surveys, renting the typical American home costs more than $12,000 a year less than buying it. That record gap, confirmed in the Census Bureau’s first-quarter 2026 Housing Vacancies and Homeownership survey, has upended a bedrock assumption of middle-class financial planning: that owning almost always beats…

A New York City teacher earning $65,000 a year wants to move closer to her school. A nurse needs a bigger apartment after a second child. A restaurant worker’s landlord won’t fix the heat. All three face the same brutal arithmetic: signing a new lease in the same city would require roughly $70,000 more in…