Many Young Adults Need Parents’ Help to Buy a Home

Three out of four young adults who recently bought their first home needed their parents’ help to afford the down payment, closing costs or other expenses, a new survey finds.

Interest in homeownership is picking up, especially among first-time buyers, and mortgage lender loanDepot LLC commissioned a survey to find out how today’s millennials — 97% of whom will take out a mortgage to buy their homes — plan to pay for their investment.

It seems the “bank of mom and dad” is a fallback most count on, with 75% of young adults who recently bought a home saying their parents helped them out. Another survey, this one from BMO Harris Bank, finds that about a quarter of first-time homebuyers expect to get money from their parents or other relatives.

Among parents of future would-be homebuyers, 17% of respondents to the loanDepot survey say they expect to have to chip in, up four percentage points from five years ago — a gap that suggests a number of today’s wanna-be homeowners expecting financial assistance probably shouldn’t hold their breath.

There are some indications that, even as young adults expect more assistance from their parents, the older generation has a dwindling amount of resources they can use to help. Over the past five years, just under three-quarters of parents who helped their kids buy homes used their savings, but that number is expected to fall to about two-thirds in the future, according to the survey. Instead, more parents will refinance their own homes, take out personal loans and borrow against their 401(k)s — potentially risking their own financial security.

And parents are digging deeper into their pockets to help out in other ways, too: Almost a third say they’ll pay some of their kids’ other expenses to help the younger generation save money, and 18% plan to help their kids pay down their student loans. Of the parents who are contributing to their kids’ investments, half say they’ll help their kids make the down payment, 20% say they’ll help with closing costs and 20% say they’ll actually co-sign the loan.

This might be reasonable in markets where high down payments are the norm, but experts warn that parental assistance sometimes can mask the fact that the home just isn’t affordable for the aspiring homebuyers. “One of our clients helped the child buy into the same neighborhood they lived in. The parents were excited, but it turned out to be a huge burden for the kids,” Brett Gookin, principal at wealth management firm Aspiriant, told SFGate.com last year. (San Francisco has the second-highest average down payment in the country, just behind New York City.)