Survey: Baby boomers won the housing market, and are the least convinced it worked
When it comes to homeownership, baby boomers are the generation that won, so to speak.
They bought homes when prices were a fraction of what they are today, watched their equity climb for decades, and now hold roughly half of all the home equity in the country. If any generation should feel like homeownership delivered on its promise, it's this one.
Yet when asked whether homeownership has lived up to its billing as a cornerstone of the American Dream, baby boomers were the most skeptical generation of all. In a recent American Dream survey of homeowners conducted by Hometap, baby boomers were the only age group whose single most common word for the state of that dream was "eroding," and they had the lowest share of any generation to say the dream has "fully delivered."
That's the paradox: The homeowners who generally had it easiest are the least convinced homeownership has delivered. For younger homeowners, or people hoping to become one, that gap says something about the road ahead.
Why the Generation That ‘Won’ Is the Most Skeptical
Skepticism about homeownership might be expected to track with hardship — the people struggling most to buy a home would be the most disillusioned about the experience. The survey data shows something more surprising.
Asked which single word best describes the state of the American homeownership dream today, baby boomers landed on "eroding" more than any other word, at 39.6%. Millennials and Gen X both led with "evolving," a notably more hopeful read. The youngest respondents saw the dream as changing shape; the oldest saw it wearing away.
The pattern held when respondents were asked directly whether homeownership has delivered on its role as a cornerstone of the American Dream. Only 13% of baby boomers said it "fully delivered," compared with 22.8% of millennials and 18.3% of Gen X.
The generation with the most equity, the highest homeownership rate, and the longest runway of appreciation was the least likely to say the dream paid off.
It doesn't appear to be buyer's remorse, either — baby boomers overwhelmingly still value their homes; 58.3% chose "stability" as the word that best captures what homeownership means to them today. The skepticism seems to be less about the home itself and more about the system around it.
The Winners Don't Feel Like Winners
Equity on paper doesn't automatically translate into security in retirement, and the data suggests baby boomers know it.
Consider the timing. An average of 11,400 Americans are turning 65 every day — the largest wave of people reaching traditional retirement age in history, according to the Alliance for Lifetime Income's Retirement Income Institute, which calls the milestone "Peak 65." More than half of baby boomers turning 65 between 2024 and 2030 have assets of $250,000 or less, the same research found.
That insecurity showed up in the survey data. Nearly two-thirds of baby boomers (63%) agreed they worry they'll need their own savings and assets for retirement before they can help their kids — a higher share than millennials (50.6%).
The generation closest to being able to help their children financially, and with the most equity to help from, is the most worried they won't be able to.
Other research echoes the same anxiety. FreddieMac research found that baby boomer homeowners' confidence in a comfortable retirement slipped to 68% in 2024, down from 81% in 2021. And 51% of U.S. adults surveyed by Northwestern Mutual in 2025 think it's somewhat or very likely they'll outlive their savings.
So the "winners" are looking at substantial home equity on one side of the ledger and real retirement uncertainty on the other — a gap between wealth on paper and confidence in practice that helps explain why the dream reads as "eroding" to this generation, even as home values sit near record highs.
Why It Matters to Younger Buyers
If homeownership feels this precarious for people who bought cheap and held on for decades, the challenge facing today's buyers is structural rather than just perception.
The affordability math has genuinely changed. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that home prices climbed to roughly five times the median household income in 2024, an all-time high. Home prices have risen 551% since 1980, as of 2024, while incomes rose 373% over the same period, pushing the national price-to-income ratio to about 5.08 — nearly double the level widely considered affordable, according to a Clever Real Estate and Best Interest Financial analysis.
That gap has quietly rewritten the timeline of a life milestone. The typical first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old, an all-time high, and first-time buyers have shrunk to a record-low 21% of the market, according to the National Association of Realtors' 2025 profile. A generation ago, first-time buyers were routinely in their late 20s.
This isn't a story of one generation versus another. Baby boomers moved through the housing market at a different moment than today's buyers, and survey data suggests many are as concerned about their children's prospects as their own. But the structural shift matters for how younger buyers might read their own experience: Finding a first home harder to reach at 40 than a previous generation did at 28 reflects a real change in the ratios, not a personal shortfall.
Baby Boomers Aren't Leaving (and That's Reshaping the Market)
For years, the housing industry anticipated a "silver tsunami" — a wave of baby boomers downsizing and freeing up family-sized homes for the next generation. It hasn't arrived on the timeline many expected, and understanding why explains a lot about today's tight market.
Start with who's actually buying and selling. Baby boomers regained the top spot as the largest share of home buyers at 42% in the past year, per NAR, while millennials fell to 29%. Rather than exiting the market, many baby boomers are competing in it, often with cash from a lifetime of home appreciation.
They're also holding onto space. Redfin reports that as of 2024, empty-nest baby boomers own 28% of the nation's large homes (three bedrooms or more), while millennials with kids own just 16% — roughly twice as many large homes held by people who no longer need the bedrooms as by the families who do.
The incentives to stay put are considerable. Nearly 58% of baby boomer homeowners own their homes free and clear, with no mortgage payment. Combined with the rate lock-in effect, moving can look like a financial downgrade. And a 2024 AARP report found that 75% of adults 50 and older say they want to stay in their current homes as they age.
The result is a market where the homes younger families want are owned, comfortably and mortgage-free, by people with little reason to sell. The typical homeowner now stays put for 12 years, according to Redfin, nearly double the 6.5 years that was typical in 2005.
The Wealth Is Real, but It's Mostly Staying Put
There's an enormous amount of housing wealth in baby boomer hands. Federal Reserve data shows that, as of the second quarter of 2026, they hold about 52% of all U.S. household wealth, versus roughly 11% for millennials, even though the two generations make up nearly identical shares of the adult population.
That gap is less about hoarding than about time. Adjusted for inflation, younger Americans at an average age of 34 hold slightly more average wealth than baby boomers did at the same age, according to Federal Reserve data. But baby boomers have had decades of compounding home appreciation that today's buyers, entering the market later and at higher prices, haven't had time to accumulate.
That wealth will eventually change hands. Cerulli projects that an estimated $124 trillion will transfer to heirs and charity through 2048, with baby boomers and older generations accounting for the vast majority. The open question for younger buyers is timing and access: That transfer plays out over decades and flows unevenly. NAR reports that in 2024, 1 in 4 first-time buyers used a gift or loan from family for their down payment.
The Hometap survey data points to a related pattern. More than two-thirds of baby boomers (67.7%) agreed they'd never thought of their home equity as a way to help their family buy a home — the highest share of any generation. When asked the most realistic way they could help their kids become homeowners, the most common answer among baby boomers was "leaving my home as an inheritance" (30.7%). For many respondents, help is associated with something that happens later, rather than a resource that could be accessed sooner.
Price-to-income ratios are for the 100 largest metro areas by population. Income data for 2024 are based on Moody’s Analytics forecasts. Source: JCHS tabulations of National Association of Realtors, Metropolitan Median Area Prices; Moody’s Analytics estimates.
What This Means for Younger Homeowners
The data suggests two things can be true at once. The deck is stacked differently than it was a generation ago, and a lot of the forces at play — rates, prices, inventory, who owns what — are outside any one person's control.
There's a more practical takeaway, too. Homeowners who bought recently, even modestly, are building the same asset that became the foundation of baby boomer wealth. That equity is real, and it doesn't have to wait decades — or sit untouched until it becomes an inheritance — to be understood as a resource.
The pattern in the survey data is that a large share of home equity nationally has gone unexamined as something that could be used sooner rather than later. Understanding what equity is worth, and what options exist for accessing it, is a separate question from deciding whether or when to use it — but it's one more homeowners may want to ask earlier than the generation before them did.
Methodology: The survey referenced throughout this article was conducted by AYTM on behalf of Hometap among 1,000 U.S. homeowners ages 18 and over, representing a mix of ages, demographics, and regions. Respondents were recruited through AYTM's online panel and screened to confirm homeownership. Results reflect a 95% confidence level with an approximate 3% margin of error. For this analysis, generations were grouped as millennials (ages 25-44), Generation X (ages 45-64), and baby boomers (ages 65-79).
This story was produced by Hometap and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
