Here is a conversation about how young New Yorkers managed to buy their first homes.
Read the full article: Buying a home in your 20s isn't impossible. Just ask these New Yorkers. - Homes.com
Key highlights:
- Long Island is one of the most expensive housing markets in New York, with a median home price of $749,000 compared to the national median of about $393,000.
- Alyssa Chambers secured $32,500 in down payment assistance through a local program, enabling her to buy and renovate a one-bedroom condo in Amityville for $270,000.
- Katelyn and Kevin Recupero saved nearly $150,000 by living with family and eventually bought a $545,000 home in Holtsville that includes an accessory apartment to help cover their mortgage.
- Joseph Saladino worked since his teens to put together $150,000 for a down payment on a one-bedroom, one-bathroom condo in Selden he bought this year for $225,000.
Related articles:
• Spouse or house? Most buyers prefer the latter.
• Analysis: Younger households recover position as key drivers of housing market
• Number of first-time homebuyers hits new low, survey shows
Transcript
00:00 He started saving when he was 16. So the way his-
00:03 I was not thinking about buying a house at 16.
00:05 I was not thinking about anything, buying anything at 16.
00:27 Every home has a heartbeat, a history and a story to tell. Some homes tell stories of self-discipline like skipping nights out and saving every dollar. Others reflect old choices like moving back in with family, or becoming a landlord for the first time. And sometimes a home marks the moment when a dream becomes real. Welcome to “Every Home Has a Story,” a podcast from Homes.com where we explore the soul of spaces and the people who shape them. Today's tale is about ambition, grit and the dream of homeownership for people in their 20s. I'm Parker Leipzig, a member of the Homes.com News team and one of your guides on this journey through first time homeownership.
01:07 And I'm your host, Valerie Kellogg, an editor at homes.com. Today we welcome Khristopher J. Brooks, a staff writer for homes.com who covers the New York housing market. We'll call him Brooks, that's how we all know him. Brooks has reported from newsrooms across the country – Nebraska, Florida, Virginia, Tennessee – and now brings his storytelling skills to the housing beat. Welcome, Brooks.
01:29 Good to be here, thank you.
01:30 OK. So you recently wrote a story about 20-something Long Islanders who managed to buy their first homes, and it's a feat that feels almost mythical in this market. What drew you to the story and why did you choose Long Island?
01:42 When you look at the housing market across the state of New York, Long Island arguably is probably the second most expensive market outside of the borough-
01:52 I didn't realize it was the second. Outside of New York City.
01:54 I mean, obviously New York City is going to be the most expensive, but next to that is Long Island. I mean, we're talking about an area where the median sales price is $749,000.
02:02 Oh, it's gone up.
02:04 And you take that, and you compare that to the national median, which is 393, somewhere around that. It's really, really expensive to buy a home out there so when you take that context into it and that these people are in their 20s and they were able to buy a home, we're talking about a generation that has student loan debt that's way more expensive than previous generations. They have bidding wars, all these other things stacked against them. And when you wait all that, they were still able to buy a home in one of the most expensive markets, at least in the Empire State.
02:35 And that just drew me to that, "How are y'all able to do that? And whatever y'all were able to do to do that, what other ways can other people maybe emulate that if they live in other parts of the nation?"
02:47 Oh, what's the percentage these days on how many 20-somethings are actually buying a home?
02:50 It's super, super rare. The most recent data from the National Association of Realtors, in 2024, it was only 3% of everybody who bought a home was in that 18 to 25 year old range and that's even down from 4% in 2023 so it's an extremely rare feat when you look at it at the national level.
03:10 Let's talk about the folks in your story. I want to start with Alyssa Chambers, who is 26, and her journey highlights something a lot of people don't know about, that there's a lot of free money out there for them?
03:23 Yeah. I guess we could call it free money. I like to call it free money with strings attached, but.
03:29 It's complicated.
03:29 Yeah, somewhat free.
03:31 It's complicated, OK.
03:32 Yeah. So Alyssa's story is super fascinating. This was a young lady who, right before her homebuying journey, she was living in this apartment, this small apartment. She was paying $2,750 a month for her rent, and the landlord told her that he wanted to increase it to 6% and he told her that last fall.
03:53 And she was like, "You know what? I'm just sick of renting now," and she wasn't going to renew the lease. So she had her own goal to get out of that lease and buy a house before Christmas, and so she applied to all of these local programs that help you do first-time home-owning.
04:10 And she was very self-motivated. She really was scrappy and got out there and did the job.
04:15 Did her digital homework. She researched a lot of her programs on the Island that help you with that, and she ended up getting accepted by this program from the Community Development of Long Island. And they gave her a large amount for a home down payment, $32,500, but obviously there were some strings attached to that as well. She had to meet a certain income requirement. She had to go through financial counseling. They gave her a mortgage counselor, and she took some of that money and she did some renovations on her unit. She ended up buying a condo. It was a one-bedroom condo in Amityville. She did some renovations on it, some in the bathroom, some in the kitchen and stuff like that. She took about $18,000 of that money and put it into renovations. And the rest went down for the down payment of the house that she paid, the condo, excuse me, that she paid $270,000 for.
05:06 OK
05:07 It seems like it's rare for people to do that. Why do you think those kinds of programs don't have that publicity that people know they can do something like that to get help?
05:18 Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I feel like between government agencies and nonprofits, there's across the country these different programs that'll give you a down payment or give you a forgivable loan or stuff like that, and not enough people know about it. And it might be just a combination of those agencies and nonprofits not doing aggressive enough marketing, the own not knowing of first time home buyers to do the research for it because it's not just going to fall in your lap. It's not going to be like some letter in the mail to say, "Come apply for this."
05:50 And then a little bit, I think it's just a pride thing. Some people are just like, "I should be able to do the home buying process the traditional way." There's maybe a little bit of stigma, at least in their own mind to having to use these programs to get them over.
06:05 I'm sure there's that, but I did apply for a mortgage through the Long Island Housing Partnership. At the end of this process, the counselor handed me a stack of business cards and said, "When you're out there in the world, I want you to hand my business card to every single person that you know or you meet who's looking for a house, who's looking to buy a house and is struggling to do so."
06:25 I think it's a nationwide thing. I think people just aren't aware widely enough that these programs exist, because if they were, I mean, I honestly feel like people would be knocking their doors down to come do this because when you look at it in its totality, this isn't hard work to get these payments or get these, accepted into these programs. It's timely, right? It's a lot of paperwork.
06:47 Time-consuming.
06:48 And because it's not as of a heavy lift, more people should be wanting to do this, but they don't.
06:54 Keep doing those stories. Keep following that up on your beat.
06:56 That's right.
06:57 Now tell us about Katelyn and Kevin Recupero, both 27.
07:01 What this couple decided to do was actually stay with Katelyn's mother. They saved basically most all their money. They didn't have to pay utility bills or rent or anything like that and that helped them save close to, but not exactly like $150,000 by the time it was all said and done to buy a house. They eventually bought a three-bedroom house for $545,000, but a couple of things that was crazy about their journey.
07:34 The house that they're in actually wasn't the first house that accepted their offer. So they looking for homes, looking for homes, and they found this house that they really liked in Ronkonkoma, New York. And the day before they were going to close on the house, the house caught fire and it burned to the ground.
07:54 Wow.
07:55 They were beside themselves for many weeks. I remember talking to Katelyn about that part and her telling me that they mourned for weeks, and there was a period in her and her husband started where they just stopped looking for a house because they hadn't really emotionally got over the fact that that was the house that they saw themselves in.
08:20 And had they invested a lot into that house before everything went wrong?
08:25 Exactly. They had put all the down payment stuff down. They had put money in escrow. They had did all the things that you were supposed to do to close for the house. Those funds went back to them. And the moment that they saw those funds go back to their account, that's when it became real to them. The fact that they were not going to be able to move into that house, and the fact that they effectively had to start from the beginning.
08:48 But they eventually found this house. And one of the things that's interesting about where they live now is that there's an accessory apartment that is connected to the house that they bought that's allowing them to help with the mortgage that they're paying on it.
09:02 Wow.
09:03 That's a clever way, if you can get in a house, have someone else's rent payments help you swing the mortgage.
09:10 Absolutely. OK. Let's take a short break and when we come back, we'll talk about more of these creative people in your story.
09:20 Great. Sounds good to me.
09:22 Expert voices, local impact. Our journalists bring you sharp analysis and compelling stories from every corner of the US housing market. See what our newsroom is uncovering at Homes.com/News.
09:33 Next, Brooks, let's talk about Joseph Saladino. He's also a saver, but he took it to the extreme, didn't he?
09:40 I would say so, and by extreme I'd say. I mean, this man started saving for his house when he was a teenager. He started saving when he was 16. So the way his-
09:51 I was not thinking about buying a house at 16.
09:54 I was not thinking about anything, buying anything at 16.
09:58 No, I was trying to get enough money to go to the mall.
10:00 Exactly.
10:01 What he told me was he first wanted to save for a car. So he started working as a teenager and he saved up about $5,000. And when he got that, he used that to purchase himself a Chevy Monte Carlo.
10:14 So he wanted to buy a house, but he said, "No, let me dip my toe in and buy a car."
10:18 Bought a car first.
10:19 You got to find a way to get to the house, right?
10:21 Exactly.
10:21 OK. All right.
10:22 And he thought that was a great accomplishment, so he said, "The next thing I'm going to do is save for a house."
10:28 And I remember interviewing him and asking him, as a teenager, "What motivates you to think about that particular purchase?" Because like we said, as teenagers, that's the last thing on our minds, right?
10:41 But what was interesting about his tale is he has other family members who bought houses in their early 20s. He has an uncle who bought a house in his late 20s and a cousin that bought his house at 21 or 24 or something like that so he grew up watching these other male figures in his life, purchase a home really early. And so that served as an inspiration for him. He was like, "I'm going to do the same thing as them."
11:06 So Joseph was so fixated on saving money. Does he feel like he missed out on his childhood or his teen years and does he have any regrets?
11:14 In order to save up for the down payment for the condo that he eventually bought, he just had this long laundry list of full-time and part-time jobs that he did. He worked at one point in a pizzeria. He was a cashier for Rite Aid, full-time driver for UPS, so he just scraped and scrubbed it together.
11:37 But you're right, Valerie, I did ask him that question. He said, "I was never the guy that wanted to go out clubbing or any of that. That just was never my personality." And that helped him feel like he was okay with saving that money. He did say, "I dipped into it a little bit to pay for me and my prom dates' tickets to the prom, but for the most part-"
11:58 Prom date tickets. That's a priority, isn't it?
12:00 Yeah, exactly. But he didn't spend as aggressively, or as widely as maybe you and I would have as teenagers. But in some ways, maybe he missed out on stuff, but he also is a homeowner now so it's a give or take.
12:17 So Brooks, what do you think your story says about the next generation of homeowners?
12:22 It's going to be probably tougher than ever going forward to purchase a home no matter what market you're in just because of the median prices going up. But that also means you're going to have to bring some creativity to your home buying journey. Sometimes that means living in with your parents for a couple of years, sometimes that means tapping a nonprofit to help you with the down payment. That's going to look different for every home buyer and every journey. But I think that extra level of help from an outside entity, whether that be your parents or something like that, is probably going to be the norm for that generation if they want to achieve their American dream.
13:05 And what would you say to someone who's listening in their 20s and wondering if they'll ever own a home?
13:10 The problem is, especially the younger generation, they see how far prices have grown, they see how far mortgage rates have grown and it's somewhat depressing news. And I think the first step to that is just getting over and finding a way to not let that bog you down and still have confidence in your ability to get it done. I think you also have to come to terms with the fact that it may take longer for you to save up for it. Your own internal process has to feel like that's more important no matter how long it's going to take. You have to be, "I'm going to buy a home, and there's no other plan B, C or D to this."
13:49 That's going to take them longer because their incomes are lower when they first start off out of college and going into their first career, but it's not impossible. And I think if you fix your mind to say that immediately in your 20s, that's half the journey. That's half the battle itself.
14:05 Brooks, this has been so informative. Thank you for being here.
14:08 Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. This was great.
14:12 Why don't you take us out, Parker?
14:14 Thank you to our listeners for joining us on this journey through history, imagination, and the power of home. Tune in next time to “Every Home Has a Story,” and start your search today for more homes for sale at Homes.com. I'm Parker Leipzig with the Homes.com News team. I'll see you next time.
Learn more
Interested in buying or selling a home? Go to Homes.com Learning for advice.
The podcast was recorded in September 2025.