A dream house, sans spouse: More single women buy their own homes

Karen Phelan remembers how scared she was when she bought her first home 10 years ago. Newly divorced and broke, she'd saved for a year for a down payment on a modest house.

"I just got tired of waiting for Mr. Right to come along and start the American dream," says Phelan, who owns her own company, which resells time-shares. Last year, she sold that house and bought a larger one in a gated golf-course community in Reno.

"They're kind of like emotional trophies," says Phelan, 43. "It's symbolic of success -- of getting out there and doing it on my own and saying, 'I'm just as capable of doing it as the next person and doing it on my own and making it.'"

A lot of other women seem to feel the same way. Last year, single women snapped up one of every five homes sold. That's nearly 1.5 million, if you're counting -- more than twice as many as single men bought, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The trend is striking, because in 1981, the number of single women and single men home buyers was virtually the same. Since then, the percentage of buyers who are single women has almost doubled, while the percentage of single men buyers slipped 1 percentage point to 9% last year.

This rise of single-women homeowners is part of a greater social and economic shift that is reshaping American life.

"For the first time in history, women have access to the same resources men have always had -- money, social status, power," says Donald Hantula, professor of organizational psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia.

"Women can go and acquire them on their own rather than searching for a mate to provide them. These demographic and social changes are not in line with how we adapted in the hunter-gatherer era."

This trend is forcing changes in real estate. The building industry is beginning to add features to homes with women in mind. Mortgage lenders are doing more to help women qualify for loans.

"There have been so many advances and innovations in the market to respond to them," says Regina Lowrie, chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association and the first woman to hold that post.

Some of the most critical demographic changes that have opened up the real estate market to women include:

*Women (and men) are marrying later. On average, women now wait until they're nearly 26 to walk down the aisle, about six years later than in 1960, according to Census data. On average, men today marry at age 27, an increase of five years in that same period.

*Divorce. A Census study showed that 73% of women who married between 1980 and 1984 reached their 10th anniversary, compared with 90% of women who married between 1945 and 1949. Still, as many as half of new marriages end in divorce.

*Women tend to live longer than men. The average man will die at 74, giving the average widow (who'll die at 79) five more years to buy a home on her own.

"The large pool of unmarried individuals reduces the social weight of marriage, in economics and politics," says Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. "It creates tastes, habits and expectations, as well as voting blocs not tied to the role of wife or husband."

Unmarried women have more money than ever.

In part,

that's because more women than men are going to college. Men have been the minority on college campuses since the 1970s, and they now make up just 44% of the student body. There are more women than ever on the job -- 46% of the workforce -- and the pay gap with men is closing.

The rush of single women to buy homes is impressive, coming after decades of sex discrimination by banks and real estate agents.

Before 1974, when Congress amended the Fair Housing Act to stop sex discrimination, it was hard for single women to get a mortgage, or even a credit card, in their own names.

If a woman was married, her income was usually discounted on a loan application, Coontz recalls, because the bank assumed she would stop working once she had children.

Those days are gone. Today, mortgage companies offer products to help low-income applicants qualify for loans.

Single moms and homes

Women, in particular, benefit because 25% of single mothers spend more than half their income on housing, compared with 10% of single fathers who do, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

When Patty Tarling became a single parent, she was 20. She then struggled for 15 years before she could buy her first home in Hillsboro, Ore. Borrowing against her 401(k) retirement plan, she put down 3% of the home price and received a loan insured by the Federal Housing Administration.

Last year, Tarling sold that home and moved to a suburb of Sacramento, where she's an office manager for a mortgage lender. She bought a three-bedroom, two-bath house.

"I did 100% financing, because the security of having a big cushion in savings and other investments is huge for me after living paycheck to paycheck for most of my life," says Tarling, now 40.

Owning a home "is the biggest accomplishment I've had -- I'm just elated by it. Aside from your child, just the sense of confidence and self-worth you have to say you own your home is just huge."

Tarling concedes it's a little intimidating for her boyfriend, who was displaced by Hurricane Katrina and now lives with her.

"It's just a step," she says. "If we get married or something, we'll buy a place together."

Because of new government loan criteria, many lenders will now help single women in several ways. They will:

*Let women count child support from an ex-husband as income to help qualify for loans.

*Consider divorced women as first-time buyers,

even if they bought homes with their former husbands, so the women can qualify for further help. First-time home buyers can often receive down-payment assistance or low-down-payment loans.

*Let women use some alternative forms of credit history, such as their phone bill record, in case they never had credit in their own names, says Lowrie of the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Single women home buyers often need help because their median income is $47,315 a year -- 20% less than for single men buyers.

Buying the first condo

Sarah Van Elderen, 23, who graduated last year from Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich., doesn't make that much money. Still, she bought her first condo in Grand Rapids, Mich., with a fixed-rate, no-down payment loan for first-time home buyers.

(No-money-down loans can be risky if home prices in the area decline, and the owner needs to sell.)

She's proud of her first condo, even though she says, "The reaction of my 94-year-old grandma was, 'You're going to end up single if you buy a house yourself.'"

Actually, the rising number of single women homeowners could change the dating scene completely, says Hantula of Temple University.

"Houses are a great source of wealth, and as women are buying and holding onto them, they will gain greater equity and become less dependent on male partners for material assets and protection," Hantula says.

"Over the long term, women will become pickier, more choosy. They will look beyond an asset-based mating decision. ... Characteristics like emotional stability and other kinds of compatibility will become more important."

Apparently, home builders also want to be more attractive to single women buyers now. They're designing homes with features preferred by women.

"Women want more security than men, and less maintenance," says Anthony Perry, co-owner of Oakwood Homes, a developer in Woodstock, Ga.

"It's just doesn't matter to men as much. We're putting in flat-screen TVs for the guys."

Among the amenities Perry adds with women in mind: a courtyard design that provides a stronger sense of security, gated communities and twice as many street lights.

He also adds larger closets and energy-efficient appliances, which he thinks matter more to women. He also provides maintenance services for his home buyers. "We water outside the courtyard, mow the grass out front -- we even change the heating and cooling filters," he says.

Asked why he thinks so few single men buy homes, Perry replies: "Men do it when we get married. Until then, we're just out running around."

Tommie Livatino, a high school basketball coach in Chicago, is one of the rare single-male home buyers.

"Every time I bought a piece of property, I always saw it as an investment first, and a way to keep living with my friends," says Livatino, 36.

He rented out rooms to his friends in his first house and bought his second and third homes with friends. Why does he think more single women buy homes than single men?

"Maybe women are much more intelligent than men," he says.

A professor's theory

Historically, men have always had access to the resources to provide shelter and don't have the same imperative, says Hantula, the organizational psychology professor.

"Throughout our evolutionary history, access to shelter was more the province of men than women. You take the hunter and gatherer into the 21st century, and men say, 'I don't need to go buy shelter, because if I need it, I can get it.' Whereas the woman is saying, 'If I have the chance, I better get it while I can.'"

Pat Spalding, 54, who is single and lives in Lakeland, Fla., sold her home and bought a nicer one last year. She recalls how a single male colleague had a very different reaction to buying a home.

"He needed to buy a home for the tax shelter, but he said, 'If I want to get up and leave, I don't want to have something to sell,'" recalls Spalding, who works in the real estate division of Central Florida Gas.

"But I need the security. I own this. ... And I don't want to depend on anyone for anything, and men don't seem to care about that."

The trend toward single women home buyers might be socially unsettling in the short term, Hantula notes.

And for women home buyers -- who are doing something that their mothers had to fight to do -- purchasing their first home can be personally unsettling, too.

"The first experience was really scary for me," Phelan says.

"I'm not going to candy-coat it. I don't think any woman out there is going to tell you the first purchase going solo is easy, because it's a huge investment."

Contributing: Barbara Hansen

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