Day: November 4, 2025

• Gen Z and millennial homebuyers are struggling in the real estate market.
• To make homeownership more affordable, some buyers are turning to their friends and family.
• A Zillow expert told BI that 20% of wedding registries now include house funds.

It’s no secret that becoming a homeowner is financially out of reach for many millennials and Gen Z buyers.

Zillow data shows that in 2025, the typical median-income family would need to earn about $17,670 more this year than last to afford the mortgage on a typical US home.

It couldn’t happen at a worse time.

While home prices are dipping in some cities, they remain high nationwide. And even though mortgage rates have edged lower week by week, they’re still hovering around 6% — a far cry from the 3% range seen just a few years ago. All this is unfolding against the backdrop of a sluggish economy and a job market marked by slower wage growth and a wave of layoffs hitting employers both small and large.

However, Zillow’s home trends expert Amanda Pendleton notes that some young homebuyers are finding a workaround — by asking friends and family to help them fund a home purchase.

“Spoiler alert, they’re not doing it alone. Thirty-eight percent of all buyers today are getting some kind of gift or loan from a family member or friend. And another fun stat — 20% of wedding registries now include house funds,” Pendleton told Katie Notopoulos on Business Insider’s new video podcast, “Well Spent.”

‘We would rather have wedding money spent toward a home than getting gifts”

Turning to family and friends is exactly what Aislyn and Ali Benjamin did when they got married in 2022.

The California couple didn’t want traditional wedding gifts like kitchen appliances, or anything that would be forgotten and gather dust in a few years. Instead, they asked their guests for cold, hard cash to help fund the construction of their first home.

It’s easy to understand why. The Benjamins both run small businesses in Danville, California, a city about an hour east of San Francisco, where the median home price was $1.8 million in September, according to Zillow. Buying a home in the city was unrealistic, and renting wasn’t a long-term solution. For them, building an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in Ali’s parents’ backyard in San Ramon just eight minutes from Danville was their best shot at homeownership.

And why not use a day when everyone was already celebrating them to help make it happen?

“I just made a GoFundMe, and we sent it out with our invites so people could contribute through the online link,” Aislyn, 30, told Business Insider.

In total, the couple raised $5,545 on GoFundMe and received about another $5,000 in cash, checks, and other gifts at their wedding, bringing their total to about $10,000.

That money, along with help from Ali’s parents, allowed them to build a 1,200-square-foot ADU by Bay-area-based company Villa for $500,000. They also financed the project with a mortgage.

“It gave us a little bit of a head start and a buffer, allowing us to not have to save up quite as much money,” Ali Benjamin, 35, told Business Insider.

“We would rather have wedding money spent toward a home than getting gifts.”