You have written off the twenty-eight-year-old who cannot qualify, and you are right that they cannot. The money that gets them out is one generation up, in the same house, and nobody in the transaction is talking to them.
On a mortgage market segment, the host puts two maps beside each other and lets them argue with each other.
The first shows adults aged 18 to 34 still living with mom and dad. California is at 39 percent. He points out that nobody likes the arrangement — the thirty-eight-year-old in the spare room least of all — and says this is why new household formation has fallen off a cliff.
The second map is average equity by state. "California also has an average of an astounding $627,000 in equity." His conclusion is the obvious one nobody acts on: some share of those parents would fund a down payment to get their kid out of the garage, and it would take only a fraction of that equity, not most of it.
He notes California is an outlier, then gives the rest anyway — Oklahoma at $174,000, Nevada at $296,000, Texas at $200,000, Florida at $288,000 — and adds the demographic backdrop, that in 2029 the United States will have more people aged 65 and over than children under 18 for the first time in its history.
“California also has an average of an astounding $627,000 in equity.”
Every part of your buyer prospecting is aimed at the person who will live in the house, so the conversation dies at qualification and you never speak to the household that could solve it. The parents are usually in your database already, often as past clients, and they are the ones sitting on the equity.
What changes is who is invited to the meeting. A buyer consultation with the parents in the room becomes a gift-funds conversation, a downsizing conversation, and sometimes two transactions instead of none. Look up the equity number for your own state before you make that call, because the whole conversation rests on it.