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The buying homes with friends trend is fading fast

Break clauses on co-owned houses are breaking friendships for some Americans

9/26/24 11:47AM

They say romance is dead… but now, the days of non-romantic co-ownership may also be fading.

In recent years, faced with one of the most unaffordable housing markets on record — on top of opportunities to find a significant other rapidly dwindling during the pandemic — settling down with a nice friend, sibling, cousin, or otherwise tolerable person started to make a lot of sense to prospective buyers. Indeed, as we were charting back in May, 14% of Millennials had reported buying homes with a friend. Just 1% of Baby Boomers said the same.

Millennials have been buying homes with friends — Sherwood News

The One with the Break Clause

While buying a house with friends might at first seem like a fun idea from a ‘90s sitcom, mixing money with interpersonal relationships always comes with complications… and breaking out of shared mortgages can result in messy legal battles.

Whether it’s because those co-ownership arrangements are ending naturally, though, or that more cautionary tales about the difficulty of splitting up not-so-easily-divided assets are emerging, the trend of buying homes with friends appears to be slowing down.

As outlined by Dalvin Brown for the WSJ, the number of co-buyers with different last names jumped to ~1.3 million in 2021, but has since fallen almost 30%, according to property analytics firm Attom Data Solutions.

The buying homes with friends trend is fading — Sherwood News

The same piece also cites a Zillow survey, which revealed that the proportion of co-buyers purchasing with friends had halved, from 14% in 2023 to just 7% this year.

Now, with the Fed’s interest rate cuts starting to feed through into lower mortgage rates, the housing market might start to look a little more promising for buyers — meaning that more home-owning buddies will want out of their current living arrangements, probably making for some pretty awkward dinner table conversation.

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Ahead of Mother’s Day, Google searches for “same day flower delivery” have ticked up a little earlier this year

If you’ve already made plans for a Mother’s Day gift in advance of this Sunday, congratulations. But if alarm bells are suddenly ringing, consider this a gentle reminder that, like a sizable share of the US population this time of year often does, you can still scrape together some last-minute flowers for the woman who carried you for nine months.

Data from Google Trends reveals that searches for “same day flower delivery” spike in the US in May every year, when Mother’s Day takes place. As we noted last February, the same query also gains traction around Valentine’s Day.

This year, however, it appears that searches for last-minute flowers have remained elevated in the last two months after the usual peak in February — with the search interest this April actually exceeding that seen around Cupid’s Day.

Honestly, we’re not sure why searches are spiking a little early. One explanation might be that Passover and Easter have overlapped at the start of April, and Americans wanted to celebrate with some flowers. Maybe it’s a host of Claude bots that are now running errands for AI-obsessed execs — or perhaps Americans are just impulse-buying some seasonal spring blooms after an unusually warm March, without a particular occasion.