Upper floors and windows of brightly-colored brick townhouses

Working Paper

First-Time Homebuyers: Toward a New Measure

Arthur Acolin,
Paul Calem,
Julapa Jagtiani &
Susan Wachter

October 2017

WP 17-36 - Existing data sources show divergent estimates of the number of homes purchased by first-time homebuyers as a share of all home purchases.

In this paper, the authors use a new data set to construct a time series of the share of first-time homebuyers. This series, based on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Equifax Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), shows a significant decline in this share, particularly for young households, which is consistent with the decline in homeownership in this age cohort since the early 2000s.

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