Every girl has imagined her dream house (and maybe already decorated it, hello Pinterest!), and if you’ve started to scheme and save for that perfect sanctuary where you can kick it solo, you may be less alone than you think: Recent reports from the National Association of Realtors have indicated that more single women are buying homes than their male counterparts.
According to data in the 2012 profile of buyers and sellers, “single women have purchased homes at nearly twice the rate of single men since the mid-1990s” and they made up 18% of household composition in their Profile of Buyers and Sellers, compared to 10% for single men. Especially since prior to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, “few women could get approved for a credit card, much less a mortgage, without a husband’s or father’s signature,” Single women have come a long way in the past half century in terms of financial stability and responsibility. Though general female salary averages still lag behind their male counterparts, at approximately 82 cents earned in comparison to every dollar earned by the average male, childless women are on track to out earn their male counterparts, in metro areas. Additionally, According to the credit score company Experian, women tend to handle credit more responsibly, with men having “a 7 percent higher incidence of late mortgage payments and 4.3 percent more debt than women.”
The final factor when it comes to women’s recent rocking of the real estate market may be something of an innate sense of particularity and optimism when it comes to evaluating property. Karen Krupsaw, the Vice President of Real Estate Operations at Redfin explained to the New York Daily News that the discriminating buyers that single women tend to be, “can see beyond the way [a property] may show as well as how they can fix it up and how it can be a dream home.”
Though as collegiates, we may need a few years to bolster our bank statements, its nice to know the path is being paved for us to be homeowners on our own, without having to depend on a spouse to support us!