Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Kristel Leow will buy her first home -- a Capitol Hill condo -- at the end of the month.
"I didn't really want to keep putting money toward rent," Leow, 24, said Wednesday. "I've lived here for two years, and I keep watching prices go up and wanted to get in while I still could."
The desire to build equity also motivated Jade Nguyen, 35, to buy her Queen Anne condo last month.
"I've actually been saving money to buy real furniture. When I was renting, I guess I wasn't real excited about buying nice furniture and expensive things," she said, adding that so far most of the other residents in her new building are women.
And increasingly, that's the trend: Most people who buy homes on their own are women.
The National Association of Realtors found in a study of American home buyers in 2006 that a record 22 percent were single women, while just 9 percent were single men. Single women have outnumbered single men as home buyers since the mid-1980s and are responsible for 40 percent of condo purchases nationally.
Williams Marketing President Leslie Williams, whose Seattle firm works with condo developers, has seen the same trend locally.
"Single women, much younger than single men, will go out and buy," she said. "I bought my first house when I was 20. I was still in college."
Women living alone -- as owners or renters -- outnumber men in Seattle and across the country, according to U.S. Census estimates. In 2005, 26.5 percent of adult women in Seattle lived on their own, compared with 25 percent of adult men. The percentage of adult women living on their own was higher in Seattle than in the county, state, nation and other cities, including San Francisco and Portland.
These numbers do not include single women such as Holly Diehl, because she lives with her 12-year-old son in a Ballard townhouse she bought in August. Diehl is one of 11,679 single mothers living with children in Seattle, according to 2005 Census estimates. That's more than twice the number of single dads.
Diehl, 36, said she wasn't in a financial position to buy until a few years ago.
"And then I was kind of scared to," she said. "It seemed like a big thing to do because we waited so long."
So why do more women buy homes on their own? "They seem to be a little bit more willing to extend themselves," Williams said.
"My theory is that women at a younger age are more focused on what their career path is," she said, therefore putting themselves in a better position to buy a home sooner.
Women also tend to be better with money, said Peter Francese, a demographic trends analyst for the advertising, marketing and public relations agency Ogilvy & Mather and the founder of American Demographics magazine.
"I get a check, I give it right to my wife," he said. "If you're not very good at managing money, why would you buy a house?"
But financial factors seem to be the main motivation for women like Leow, Nguyen, Diehl and Tjada D'Oyen, a 30-year-old who bought her first home -- a Brooklyn, N.Y., co-op -- three years ago.
"I saw it was getting more and more expensive just every week," she said. "I thought it was the next step just in terms of financial stability and creating wealth and just financial independence."
She bought a Queen Anne condo last month, after taking a job with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Women have more time to buy a home on their own than they used to, because the typical age of first marriage has been increasing for decades. And they have more ability, thanks to the removal of many professional and financial barriers, according to Francese and Walter Molony, spokesman for the National Association of Realtors.
"When you go back to the '70s, women were not treated seriously by the lending community," Molony said. "Not only could women not get a mortgage, it was very difficult for women to get credit of any kind, even a credit card."
These days, women make up an increasingly disproportionate share of college graduates, which leads them to jobs that make home ownership possible. Francese said women make up 47 percent of the work force and hold 51 percent of managerial and professional jobs.
There's just something about young men, said Williams, who has 21- and 22-year-old sons.
"They don't want to take on responsibilities," she said. "They're not ready for that."
A home can be an "albatross" for a single man, Francese said. "If he gets married, she's not going to want to move into his house."
Casey Herd, 29, sublet a room from a friend when he first moved to Seattle in 1999. About two years later, he moved into the condo his then-girlfriend bought in her early 20s.
Herd didn't even think about buying a home while he was renting.
"I never really realized it was an option for me," he said.
Herd ended up marrying, then divorcing his girlfriend. Now he's renting again, but he has reserved a condo in Mosler Lofts, a building going up at Third Avenue and Vine Street.
Of course, no generalization holds true for everyone.
Diehl held off on buying a house for a while after she could afford one.
And some men, like Larry Kasoff, buy at a relatively early age.
Kasoff, 26, reserved a condo in a new building going up at Fifth Avenue and Madison Street, in downtown Seattle. He moved to Seattle just over a year ago, after graduating from law school.
"I knew I wanted to buy now that I'm working and have the money," he said.
"It makes sense to buy something, with the tax breaks and the appreciation that's been going on over the past couple of years."
Kasoff acknowledged that many young men do not share his desire and financial ability to buy a home.
"I'm probably not your typical 20-something," he said.
To see more of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for online features, or to subscribe, go to http://seattlep-I.com.
© 1998-2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All Rights Reserved.
