Building a family fortune requires a totally different playbook. Catch up on the latest from the Realtor.com® Generational Wealth series.
When Lauren Miller and her husband sold their first home in 2023, they had what many Americans are chasing today: home equity.
After six years of ownership in the Greater Boston area, the couple walked away from the sale of their condo with about $150,000 in proceeds. For a brief stretch, that money did exactly what homeownership is supposed to do—it gave them breathing room.
“I slept really well at night knowing that … we had all this money in savings,” Miller says.
But the feeling didn’t last as Miller and her husband tested those savings in one of the country’s most expensive housing markets. Even with six figures in the bank, a high income, no credit card debt, and no car payments, the next rung of the housing ladder was barely penciling out.
“We weren’t really financially ready, which seems ridiculous, because we had $150,000 in savings,” Miller says. “I mean, [if not then] when are you going to be financially ready to buy a house?”
Their story highlights a new paradox in American homeownership: Home equity builds wealth, but the payoff is becoming harder to time. For the Millers, that forced a hard question: What is housing wealth really worth if a six-figure gain doesn’t make the next phase of life feel secure.
‘Luck in timing’
Miller’s skepticism about home equity started long before she sold her own home.
“I was in the generation where my parents bought a house in 2007 and it took years before it recovered in value to what they had bought it for,” she says.
That experience shaped her sense that housing wealth was never guaranteed—a sharp contrast to the way homeownership is often discussed as a reliable engine of generational wealth.
“I don’t really think of the home as part of passing on wealth to the children,” Miller says. “I mean, because I feel like there’s so much luck in timing involved.”
Her own experience only made that tension more complicated.
Miller and her husband bought their first home in their early 30s—a powerful moment for wealth accumulation in a person’s lifetime. Buying at age 30 can lead to a net worth at age 50 that is 22.5% (or $119,000) higher than waiting 10 more years to enter the market, according to a recent analysis from Realtor.com.
They also bought before the pandemic-era run-up in prices. From 2019 to 2024, listing prices in the Boston area climbed 45%, creating $179 billion in new wealth for Gen Z and millennial homeowners, like the Millers, alone.
So Miller has seen both sides of the home equity equation: how quickly homeownership can reward a buyer who gets in at the right time, and how long it can take for that bet to pay off when the timing cuts the other way.
You can’t time the market, but you can prepare for it
That contrast speaks to the anxiety that has become a defining force in housing: If we don’t know what will happen in the market tomorrow, how can we ensure we’re making the right moves today?
The answer is complicated, according to Jake Krimmel, senior economist at Realtor.com.
“Like with any economic asset, timing and luck do play a huge role,” he says. “There will always be unforeseen economic events, whether national or local, that could make the difference between someone building more housing wealth than someone else.”
That’s why the better question, he says, is for buyers to ask themselves what is within their control—like building their savings and understanding the full scope of risks and responsibilities of homeownership before buying into the market.
That level of preparation has become more important as costs for owners have grown less predictable. For perspective, the median monthly cost for U.S. homeowners with a mortgage rose 26% from 2019 to 2025, according to American Community Survey data.
Miller says she felt that difference during the eight months she and her family rented after selling their condo—even though they weren’t building equity with their monthly housing payment, it was a relief to shift some of that uncertainty off her balance sheet.
“I felt a lot more comfortable financially because our rent was pretty similar to what our condo costs were at the end of the day, because the condo had the condo fees and the maintenance and taxes, insurance, along with our mortgage,” she says.
But while renters can feel insulated from these costs, Krimmel says they often absorb them, just indirectly.
“Rising ancillary costs are changing the homeownership calculus for sure,” he says. “But that will be true of renting as well, as higher costs of insurance, energy, and property taxes would get passed off in the form of higher rents over time too.”
So, no one can hide from rising costs. Renters may avoid a surprise repair bill, but they eventually take on the cost through higher rent. Homeowners, meanwhile, absorb those hits more directly, but they retain one advantage renters don’t: Part of their monthly housing payment ends up in equity, not in their landlord’s pocket.
That advantage shows up clearly in household wealth data. Homeowners have roughly 38 times the net worth of renters today, according to the Survey of Consumer Finances—a trend that held true even in the aftermath of the housing bubble. They’re also 30% more likely to expect to pass wealth on to their children, in large part because of the role of home equity in growing net worth.
Timing the trade-off
But the anticipation of leaving something for the next generation points to another major pressure point for housing wealth today: the timing of the transfer itself.
Already, that tension is playing out in the long-awaited Great Wealth Transfer. Cerulli Associates projects that $124 trillion will transfer through 2048, including $105 trillion expected to flow directly to heirs.
But as Americans live longer, wealth is arriving after the years when it could have made the biggest difference—something Miller and her husband are already thinking about for their young children.
“When you pass on wealth at death, your children are in their 50s, 60s, sometimes 70s, at a place in life where they’re already too far into their own financial lives to have relied on that inheritance or benefit, benefited from it in a huge way during their lifetime,” she says.
It’s a trade-off she’s acutely aware of in her own life.
“My husband and I, in our 30s, could really use a chunk of money to get through this tight time in the middle of our lives where we have young kids and our salaries aren’t what they will ultimately be later in our career,” she adds.
So rather than planning only around what they might leave behind at death, the Millers hope to help their children earlier, when money could shape the trajectory of adulthood: college, a first car, or eventually a down payment.
“What we really hope to do is to plan to help our kids along the way in their 20s and 30s, as much as we can, because we know how impactful it’ll be at those ages, and plan to leave less of an inheritance to them at the end of our lives,” she explains.
At face value, it may sound like a wholesale rejection of one of homeownership’s oldest promises: that a house is the most meaningful asset for a family to build up and pass down. But the Millers aren’t rejecting this ideal of generational wealth entirely—they’re just rethinking the timing of it.
The wealth of stability
Their approach points to a more holistic perspective of what homeownership can do for a family. Even when housing wealth cannot be perfectly timed or passed down exactly when children need it, owning can still create the stability families use to plan, save, and offer help earlier.
“Homeownership can be a way to build wealth, but it’s not the only way to do so,” Krimmel says. “Historically, it’s been a key part of the story, and I expect it will continue to be. But housing is just part of the story.”
And it’s those other parts that may matter more in a market defined by high costs and a larger sense of uncertainty.
The promise of homeownership was never just that a house would become a windfall, but that owning one would offer baseline stability that makes the rest of a family’s life easier. Over time, that stability can compound into a wealth advantage of its own.
Indeed, research shows that these advantages spill over into the next generation. Children raised in homeowner households are 18.4 percentage points more likely to become homeowners by age 35, according to an analysis from Realtor.com.
And while direct financial help is one reason this advantage persists—households that receive an inheritance of at least $5,000 are about 2.5 times as likely to become homeowners as those who do not—inheritance alone doesn’t explain the full benefit. Homeowner households can also pass down stability, neighborhood access, financial habits, and earlier help with major milestones.
“For a homeowner, housing provides many things all at once: shelter, access to local amenities like public schools and parks, long-term stability in lifestyle and cost of living, and an opportunity to build wealth,” Krimmel says. “In this way, thinking of homeownership only as an economic asset, while taking its other benefits for granted, will only amplify the anxiety around real estate.”
That makes homeownership both powerful and imperfect—a tension that Miller is now fully living in.
“Our 30s have taught us that nothing’s a guarantee,” she says, “and we just have to keep making the next right decision and hope that we get to where we want to end up.”
