There is a statistic making the rounds in real estate circles: the biggest wave of homebuyers in history is about to arrive. It is built on a simple observation. Count the people approaching the age when Americans have always bought their first home, and the count is enormous.
The count is correct. Here it is for El Paso County.
In 2015 there were 142,676 people aged 25 to 39 in El Paso County. Today there are about 177,176, the most in county history, and the forecast keeps climbing to roughly 220,051 by 2040. The wave argument gets the demography right.
It gets something else wrong. Population is not demand. Population multiplied by the ability to buy is demand, and the second number has been doing something the first number cannot see.
Here is what buying the median Pikes Peak region home has asked of the median local household income, at four points across three decades. Same market, same math: principal and interest on the median-priced home at that year's average rate, measured against that year's median household income.
| Year | Median price | Avg rate | Payment | Median income | Share of income |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1996 | $112,212 | 7.81% | $809/mo | $42,023 | 23% |
| 2006 | $214,975 | 6.41% | $1,346/mo | $53,234 | 30% |
| 2016 | $247,876 | 3.65% | $1,134/mo | $63,610 | 21% |
| 2026 | $455,415 | 6.22% | $2,795/mo | $90,778 | 37% |
Notice 2016. The monthly cost of the median home took a smaller share of income than it did in 1996. Cheap money hid the price growth for a decade. The wall did not rise gradually as prices rose. It went up almost overnight in 2022, when 3 percent money became 7 percent money and nothing else adjusted.
If the wave were converting into owners, home purchases per young adult should be rising as the cohort grows. Here is that measurement: MLS closings for every 1,000 residents aged 25 to 39, each year since 1996.
The 2025 reading of 74.3 closings per 1,000 young adults is below 2005 (113.0) and barely above the late 1990s, when the cohort was two thirds its current size. From the 2021 peak of 124.3, buying activity relative to this population has fallen by about 40 percent while the population itself kept growing. The wave arrived. The conversions did not.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked the share of 25 to 34 year old households who own their home since 1990. It was 44 percent in 1990. After a bubble peak of 50 percent in 2006 and a trough of 37 percent in 2016, it stands at 44 percent in 2024. Thirty five years, the largest young adult generation in American history, and the needle sits exactly where it started.
The National Association of Realtors' 2025 buyer survey puts the first-time buyer share of the market at 21 percent, a record low against a pre-2007 norm near 40 percent, and the median first-time buyer age at 40, up from 29 in 1981. People are not aging into homeownership. They are aging through the years when it used to happen.
Demand this large does not disappear. It diverts. It shows up in our lease data as rental demand, in household formation delayed, and in the lock-in structure of the existing market: roughly 103,000 local owners hold mortgages far enough below current rates that selling makes no financial sense, which keeps the very homes this cohort would buy off the market. The result is a market where sellers pay concessions in a majority of closings even as prices hold, and where the honest classification of conditions is buyer-favoring on paper and unaffordable in practice.
The wave thesis is not wrong about the people. It is wrong about the assumption that people at buying age become buyers automatically. For this wave to convert the way earlier ones did, some combination of three numbers has to move: prices toward the $401,000 ceiling, rates enough to lift that ceiling toward the market, or incomes enough to raise it. You can test each one against real local data in the simulator.
Test the fixes yourself What is your home worth?
Sources: Colorado State Demography Office (Vintage 2024 county single year of age series); Pikes Peak MLS (ELEVATE MLS) Extrapolated Data, closed sales 1996 to 2025; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey; National Association of Realtors 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers; Freddie Mac average 30-year rates. Analysis: Rob Thompson, Realtor, Iconic Colorado Properties.
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