![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1571197896841.jpg?w=2048\")
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For a decade, I sold real estate to people who never had to call their parents.<\/p>\n
They had their own capital, their own attorneys, their own advisors. Their deals closed clean because the money was never the problem. I was good at my job, and I understood my clients \u2014 but I also understood, increasingly, what I was watching from the other side of the table: a market that was quietly sorting itself into people who had a financial backstop and people who didn\u2019t. And over time, that sorting started to feel less like a feature of high-end real estate and more like a description of the entire market.<\/p>\n
When I left brokerage to build a platform for everyday buyers, I thought I was leaving that world behind. I wasn\u2019t. The family wealth dynamic I\u2019d watched at the top of the market had quietly migrated all the way down to first-time buyers in the $400,000 range. The mechanism was different. The amounts were smaller. The outcome was the same: the buyers who got the house were usually the ones with someone to call.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the housing market\u2019s nepo problem. And it doesn\u2019t get talked about nearly enough.<\/p>\n
At some point in the last few years, \u201ccall your parents\u201d became a legitimate step in the homebuying process. Not for everyone, and not always, but often enough that it\u2019s stopped being embarrassing to admit and started being just kind of expected. First-time buyers who did everything right \u2014 saved, got pre-approved, kept their credit clean\u00a0\u2014 are still finding out that the gap between what they have and what a deal actually requires is just too wide to close on their own.<\/p>\n
So they call home. And the ones whose parents can help\u00a0get the house. The ones whose parents can\u2019t often don\u2019t. And the market just keeps moving like that\u2019s a totally normal way for things to work.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s wild is that this doesn\u2019t get talked about nearly enough. The housing conversation is obsessed with interest rates and inventory, and those things matter, but they\u2019re not the reason a financially prepared 31-year-old is calling his dad from escrow. That\u2019s a different problem,\u00a0and it\u2019s one the industry has been pretty comfortable ignoring.<\/p>\n
A\u00a0NAR report\u00a0from 2024 found that\u00a025% of\u00a0first-time buyers used a gift or a loan from family to cover their down payment.\u00a0And that number has gone up almost every year for the past decade, which means this isn\u2019t a blip from a weird market cycle,\u00a0it\u2019s the direction things are heading. The people who can buy are increasingly the people who have someone to call.<\/p>\n
What bothers me about that isn\u2019t the family help itself. Parents helping kids is as old as time and there\u2019s nothing wrong with it. What bothers me is that the help is becoming structural. It\u2019s not a nice boost anymore \u2014 it\u2019s often the deciding factor. The market has quietly reorganized itself around who already has wealth in their corner and we\u2019re mostly just accepting that as normal.<\/p>\n
The conversation always goes back to prices and interest rates,<\/s>\u00a0and sure, those matter. But there\u2019s a whole other layer of cost that barely gets mentioned and it\u2019s the one that actually knocks people out of deals\u00a0\u2014 the transaction itself. Closing costs, agent commissions, inspection, appraisal, title and lender fees. On a home around the national median price right now, you can easily be looking at\u00a0$25,000 to $40,000\u00a0in cash that has to show up at closing. Cash. Not financed. Not rolled into the mortgage. Just sitting in your account ready to go. And most first-time buyers find this out way later in the process than they should.<\/p>\n
The families who\u2019ve owned homes before know this number is coming. They planned for it. Everyone else finds out somewhere around week three of escrow and either scrambles or folds.<\/p>\n
A lot of the costs layered into a real estate transaction don\u2019t reflect the actual work anymore. Some of them absolutely do and good professional help is worth paying for. But a lot of it is legacy pricing sitting on top of processes that have been almost entirely digitized. The work changed. The bill didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
That gap hits hardest at the bottom of the market, where\u00a0first-time buyers\u00a0are, where people without a financial safety net are trying to get in for the first time. They\u2019re competing against buyers who effectively have a backstop \u2014 someone who can cover the gap when the deal gets complicated or the costs come in higher than expected. That backstop is almost always family wealth. And if you don\u2019t have it, you\u2019re not on a level playing field \u2014 you\u2019re just hoping the deal is clean enough that you don\u2019t need it.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the part that really gets me, though. Homeownership is still one of the main ways regular people build long-term wealth in this country. Buy a house, pay it down, end up with something real. That system has worked for generations. But if the entry point keeps getting more expensive and more dependent on whether your family was already inside it,<\/s>\u00a0then the people who most need that wealth-building tool are the ones getting priced out of it. And the gap just compounds from there.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t a supply problem you can zone your way out of\u00a0\u2014\u00a0and\u00a0not just a rates problem, either. It\u2019s a cost-of-participation problem and until the\u00a0transaction layer gets simpler\u00a0and more honest about what things actually cost and why, the family wealth advantage isn\u2019t going anywhere. First-generation buyers deserve a fair shot at the process before they even get to the house. Right now,<\/s>\u00a0a lot of them aren\u2019t getting one.<\/p>\n
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of <\/em>Fortune.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #spent #decade #selling #homes #ultrawealthy #explains #housing #markets #nepo #problem<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For a decade, I sold real estate to people who never had to call their parents. They had their own capital, their own attorneys, their own advisors. Their deals closed… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2436,104,821,428,2070,1898,166,224,2438,766,382,1137,2437,81],"class_list":["post-1378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-baby-boomers","tag-decade","tag-explains","tag-gen-z","tag-homes","tag-housing","tag-markets","tag-millennials","tag-nepo","tag-problem","tag-selling","tag-spent","tag-ultrawealthy","tag-wealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}