Women Home Buyers Take Over Housing Market
It’s more than just a trend. As more and more women buyers enter into the Florida home loan market, this demographic is being catered to by advertisers and real estate agents alike.
In fact, single women now represent the fasting growing component of home buyers in the United States. According to the National Association of Realtors, this sector of society was responsible for buying approximately one out of five homes purchased in the country - a total of 1.7 million houses - in 2003. All signs point to this number having simply increased since then, the numbers of Florida home loans agreed upon by females having gone up even higher.
The same study found that single women were much more likely to own their own homes by a margin of 56 percent to 47 percent over single men.
Why such an influx of single woman buyers?
There are a lot of factors that have contributed to this growth in women buying and owning homes. For starters, increased wages have boosted homeownership as the gender gap in pay continues to slowly narrow. The job market has been tilting toward females for a few years now.
Another major factor is the increased availability of financing for women. Not so many years ago a woman seeking to buy a house faced formidable obstacles to obtaining a Florida home loan - or any kind of credit for that matter. Fortunately, however, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made adjustments; their outreach programs intended for first-time home buyers and minorities have done much to propel women along the path to homeownership.
For example, divorced women are frequently given first-time buyer status even if they owned a home in the marriage, making many low down payment, no down payment Florida home loans or subsidized loans available to them. Child support payments can now be counted as income, bolstering many newly single parent’s ability to qualify for a mortgage.
Influence of the housing market
The scorching hot real estate market of the last few years has enticed many women into buying a home as an investment. Other figures reveal that 13 percent of Americans buying second homes are single women and the more adventurous are increasingly buying older homes, renovating, and reselling them as a mechanism for asset growth. More traditional types of primary residence purchases also offer financial appreciation as well as many security benefits.
Moreover, women no longer view themselves as helpless when it comes to maintaining or even improving a home. Home improvement clinics at the big box home improvement stores are filled with DIY homeowners without a Y chromosome in sight. Likewise all of those shows on television have attracted a wide audience of female viewers, a fact not lost on advertisers who are reaching out to them with new products especially designed for handywomen - we’ll do the same:
Get your Florida home improvement loan today!
