The Cyr Team · High-Value Questions

The Next-Buyer Question — Buyer Side

Vincent Cyr · Associate Broker, CLHMS Guild, SRES, ABR

Published 08/29/2026 · The seller's half of a two-piece question — read the seller's half

Who is the next buyer, and will they have enough money to afford the house? This half of the question is yours. The other half — asked from the seller's chair — is its own piece.

You are writing an offer on a home that was already priced above its comparable properties. You want to offer more because it is a competitive situation, and you have lost many other homes in the process. In fact, you are willing to waive the mortgage contingency and bring extra money to the table just to make your offer stand out. You assume that prices will go up, because that is all you know — it is all you have seen in your adult life. You have witnessed an increase in home values that far surpasses historical levels.

But that is not your history.

And because you and your wife are qualifying on nearly all of your combined income — $300,000 together — while committing a sizable share of your savings just to make this purchase, you may not realize that places you in roughly the top 5–7% of American households by income.¹ More people earn less than you than earn more.

In 10 years, 20 years, you may want to sell your home. You may want to sell it for 50% more than what you paid for it — maybe more. Have you ever thought: will there be a buyer for my home who can pay the price I want, when I want it?

Maybe you've heard the answer already: the largest generational wealth transfer in history is coming. Trillions of dollars, moving from your parents' generation to yours. Surely that solves it — surely that's who buys your house when you're ready to sell.

It doesn't, and the reason is worth understanding now, not after you've counted on it. Estimates for what will actually reach heirs over the next two decades range from $36 trillion to $124 trillion⁸ — a spread wide enough that even the firms modeling it don't agree on the scale. But the total isn't the number that matters. The distribution is. Nearly three-quarters of that money is going to households that are already among the wealthiest.⁹ Something close to six in ten millennials will inherit next to nothing.⁹ And what does arrive tends to arrive late: near-term transfers through 2035 skew toward Gen X, not millennials, despite Gen X being the smaller generation, and more than half of all boomer wealth doesn't move at all until a surviving spouse also passes — typically eight to twelve years after the first.¹⁰

The wealth transfer is real. It is not a panacea. It doesn't broadly restore the next generation's purchasing power — it concentrates it, into fewer hands, arriving later than you'd need it. The buyers who do inherit will buy the way cash buyers already do: waiving contingencies, outcompeting the buyers financing on income alone. That's not a new buyer pool behind you. It's a smaller, stronger, more concentrated version of the pool that's already outbidding people today.

But that is in the future. I need the house now. Our family needs space, schools, a place to call home, a community to belong to. Things may be different in the future — we'll deal with it then. We don't even know if this is a concern. It never has been before.

You are absolutely right. This has never been a concern before. But "before" is not what you think it was.

Before meant a population growing by high birth rates, open immigration, more available land, and a very different income-to-price ratio. Homeownership in the United States was under 50% for much of the early 20th century.² It only climbed meaningfully after the 30-year mortgage was authorized in the late 1940s³ — going from 43.6% in 1940 to 61.9% by 1960.² That 18-point jump in two decades was the fastest increase in homeownership in American history, and it was not the result of organic prosperity. It was the result of government policy. The system was redesigned so that a family with one income and a conventional down payment could afford a house.

That system worked for two generations because the arithmetic worked. Your grandparents — and probably your parents — qualified for their home on one income at roughly a 28% front-end debt-to-income ratio.⁴ Even if both parents worked, they did not need both incomes to buy. Markets were more balanced, and nominal prices moved in a narrow band — closer to 3–4% a year over the long run,⁵ not the double-digit surges of the last five years.

You and your wife are qualifying on two incomes at 31–33% front-end DTI.⁴ You are buying the same category of house under rules that would have been considered unsafe for most of the postwar era. In 1950, total household debt in America was roughly 30% of annual income. By 2016 it had risen to 92%, and peaked at roughly 120% around the 2008 financial crisis.⁶ The homeownership rate has barely moved.² The debt load required to produce it has roughly quadrupled.⁶

The idea of being in perpetual debt on a home was anathema to most of your grandparents' generation. Homes were paid off earlier. Equity was the leverage used to purchase the next home. But before is no longer. Today is something we haven't experienced.

You have entered a real estate market in which we have seen a significant increase in home prices since Covid. Increased demand from millennials, reduced supply from entrenched baby boomers, and low interest rates during and after Covid caused a 50%+ increase in home prices in a short period of time.⁷ In parts of the country where available land is scarce — the mid-Atlantic, the Northeast, California — the ability to build enough housing to keep up with demand is simply deficient. You are part of a real estate phenomenon that is five years running and shows no sign of changing. One of the ways it could change is if more buyers in the pool just said "no." But you can't say no. You need a house.

You want the type of home you grew up in — four bedrooms, two and a half baths, a yard, a neighborhood, a place to raise your family. You may have benefitted by growing up in the suburbs and having a pretty nice, stable childhood. It is what you know and what you want. You both make good money. You should be able to afford the type of home you are looking for. But now it seems like it takes a lot more to get these homes.

You battle for homes and watch, in many cases, cash purchases win. Baby boomers who have cashed in on their primary residence. Millennials tapping into advances on their inheritance. They get the home you bid on and fuel the increases. Cash purchases do not require the third-party check of appraisals that you would get from a lender-financed transaction. Offers that exceed a perceived value get accepted, the value at the new level gets established, and prices continue upward. Buyers with financing backstop appraisals out of pocket in order to compete with cash. Once you lose a home in a neighborhood, the next one that comes on asks more than the last one. It may not even be as nice. But off you go to the open house to battle the mob who wants to see it. Because the desire and need for housing is a primary need, there is less discipline to say "no" — even if the price stays high. Your family needs a home now. Not a solution to some imaginary problem tomorrow.

And yet, in the back of your mind, you wonder:

Is this sane? Much of this is predicated on always having jobs and steady income. I have watched my parents deal with life struggles in which the unpredicted happened. They shielded me from the real facts until afterwards, but I know there was pressure, stress, and unpleasant outcomes. In the mid-2000s I saw friends who moved, who I later found out had lost their house to foreclosure. Family members who got cancer and could not stay where they were and had to sell. That's not us right now — but I'm smart enough to know life happens. Does this purchase limit our flexibility in the future?

If you need to sell at a time not of your choosing, will there be a shortage of buyers, or a shortage of money to buy your home at the price you need? If you are the last buyer in this run-up, where will the next one come from? If the cohort behind the millennials is smaller, where will the demand be when you want to move? If prices continue to rise and the cost of money stays where it is, will wages rise enough to keep these homes affordable for the next buyer?

So as a buyer with pressing and immediate needs, and legitimate anxieties about making a decision that looks good today but may be a trap tomorrow — how do I make the best decision possible? I've identified the risks, probably dismissed some of them, and accepted that the realities of today are more pressing than the uncertainties of the future. Is there a hedge I can play? A smart one — not one that relies on luck, but on the best decision I can make with the information I have. And I have no lack of access to information.

The home worked as your family's primary wealth-building strategy for two generations because the conditions underneath it held: a growing buyer pool, available land, income that kept pace with price. Your grandparents didn't need a hedge, because the system wasn't shifting under them.

It still can work. For many families, it still will. But "can" assumes the same conditions produce the same outcome — and this entire piece has been about why that assumption is the one worth examining, not accepting by default. The honest answer isn't a formula, and it isn't "don't buy the house." It's that betting your family's entire net worth on one illiquid asset, in one geography, sold eventually to a buyer pool you now know is thinner than the one your parents sold into — is a different risk than it looks like on paper, even when it's the same house. Whether that risk is one worth carrying on its own, or one worth balancing against something else, isn't a question a real estate agent is licensed to answer for you. It's a conversation for a financial advisor who can see your full picture. This page can name the question. It can't have that conversation for you.

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