For decades, the American homeownership story followed a familiar script: save for a down payment, qualify for a mortgage, and buy a home.
The aspiration remains. The economics have changed.
The median U.S. single-family home price reached roughly five times median household income in 2024, compared with 4.1 in 2019, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. That same year, the monthly mortgage payment on a median-priced home reached a record $2,570 under terms typical for first-time buyers.
The consequences are reshaping who gets to buy. First-time buyers represented a record-low 21 percent of purchases in the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 survey, while their median age reached a record 40.
But another story is emerging alongside the affordability crisis: instead of abandoning homeownership altogether, some buyers are changing what ownership looks like.
Buying Together
Co-buying is straightforward in concept: two or more people combine resources to purchase property, whether they are married or not.
That can mean siblings, friends, unmarried partners, or parents and adult children. Combining incomes can improve purchasing power and mortgage qualification, according to Freddie Mac, which has documented increased reliance among younger first-time buyers on older co-borrowers.
Multigenerational buying reflects a related shift. Fourteen percent of buyers purchased multigenerational homes in NAR’s latest data. Among them, 41 percent cited caring for or supporting aging parents—the highest share since NAR began tracking the question in 2015—while 27 percent pointed to adult children moving back home and 21 percent to adult children who never left.
The financial logic may be compelling, but co-buying also transforms a home into a partnership. Ownership percentages, mortgage liability, maintenance, inheritance, and what happens when someone wants out all need to be considered before closing.
Separating the Home From the Land
Other models are rethinking ownership itself.
Community land trusts and other shared-equity programs can separate ownership of a home from ownership of the land beneath it. Buyers receive many benefits of homeownership at a lower entry price, while resale restrictions preserve affordability for future purchasers.
That creates a trade-off: homeowners may sacrifice some potential appreciation in exchange for access to ownership that might otherwise be impossible. HUD research describes shared-equity models as one strategy for preserving affordable owner-occupied housing over the long term.
It represents a different question from traditional homeownership: what if building some equity is more valuable than waiting indefinitely to afford unrestricted ownership?
Owning Less Than a Whole Home
Fractional ownership pushes that idea further, particularly in the second-home market.
Rather than purchasing an entire property, buyers purchase a share and divide its use and costs. Pacaso, one of the best-known companies applying the model to luxury vacation homes, structures properties through individual LLCs and generally sells interests ranging from one-eighth to one-half. Its SEC filings show how technology is being used to manage everything from scheduling to maintenance and eventual resale.
Fractional ownership isn’t a universal affordability solution. It remains concentrated largely in vacation and luxury real estate, and questions around liquidity, fees, financing, and local regulation matter. But its growth challenges another entrenched assumption: that access to a property requires owning 100 percent of it.
The Bottom Line
What these models demonstrate is that the definition of ownership is becoming more flexible because buyers increasingly need it to be.
The future may include traditional homeowners alongside siblings sharing mortgages, families combining generations, shared-equity buyers, and fractional owners purchasing only what they actually need.
For real estate leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, and financial professionals, that evolution creates an important question: if the economics of buying a home have changed, how should the business of homeownership change with them?
These are precisely the kinds of conversations around real estate, capital, and new business models taking place at AVANCE Global in Las Vegas this September. Register today to join the conversation.
