When it comes to buying homes, more women are going solo
The night before Aisha Blake bought her first house, she rode her bike to the property. She wanted to see it up close. To most people, the old brick duplex in Detroit’s Virginia Park neighborhood wouldn’t stand out. The porch was crumbling, some windows were broken, and the interior needed a major face-lift.
But when Blake saw kids playing on the lawns of nearby homes, she was sold.
“I loved the first impression I had of that community, and it cemented my decision to buy it and fix it up on my own,” Blake said.
Her journey to home ownership represents a growing trend of single American women buying homes by themselves. According to a report from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 17 percent of all homebuyers in 2016 were single women. That’s double the number of single men scooping up homes, despite earning more than women.
“With job growth holding steady and credit conditions becoming somewhat less stringent than in past years, the willingness and opportunity to buy is becoming more feasible for many single women,” Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, said in the October 2016 report.
Blake, 26, also isn’t alone among her millennial peers. According to the Chase Slate 2017 Credit Outlook, one-third of millennials plan to purchase a home within the next four to five years. And they’re serious about preparation — nearly 40 percent of millennials check their credit scores every month, compared to around 30 percent of Gen Xers and Boomers.
For Blake, buying her house was a dream come true. She found it while browsing an auction website where Detroit residents can bid on abandoned homes. In May 2015, Blake won the auction for her home with a bid of $13,700 — a steal for a 2,700-square-foot house near the city’s Midtown section, which in recent years has been revived by artists, young professionals transplanted from more expensive cities, and longtime Detroit residents. But like most of the fixer-uppers on auction, Blake’s home needed serious work. So she budgeted $120,000 to turn the 1914 house into a modern-day gem.
As rewarding as it is to call the house her own, Blake admits buying alone can be stressful. There’s the obvious disadvantage of having only one income instead of two. Blake earns nearly $100,000 a year as a freelance web developer, and has carefully budgeted to avoid debt. This discipline helped her secure a $130,000 loan at a low-interest rate of 1.375 percent from a non-profit that provides mortgages and renovation loans at below-market interest rates for people purchasing property in low-income communities.
For solo buyers like Blake, scoring a mortgage at a favorable rate can be tricky, but there are some fundamental steps that can make navigating the home buying process easier. If you’re a prospective homebuyer, be sure to take the time to collect all the documents you’ll need to get approved, including the last two to three years of tax returns and recent pay stubs. If you’re self-employed, like Blake, you’ll need to double down on paperwork. Another useful bargaining chip is to have at least 15 percent of the down payment ready to go. This makes it more likely for you to get a good interest rate on your mortgage.
Blake immediately paid $1,300 after winning the auction, and paid the rest of her winning bid within six months. Even after she got her financing in order, she wasn’t prepared for the rehabilitation process, which presented a lot of complications.
Since closing on the house in November 2015, she was hit with one unexpected cost after another. The two-tone windows she adored would all need to be replaced, and extra walls had to be opened up to fix the electrical wiring.
“Every time my contractor found something wrong, it meant so much more was taken out of the loan,” Blake says.
So far, fixing the house has put her over budget by $15,000, which she paid out of pocket.
After a fresh coat of paint, Blake will soon be able to move into the home’s upper unit. She plans to rent out a room to help pay for additional upgrades, like installing a new deck. Blake’s dream is to transform the home’s lower unit into space where travelers can stay overnight and learn more about Detroit.
She advises single women who want to buy a home for the first time to pick places they can move into immediately — or else be prepared for a long road of renovations.
“Even after all this frustration, I still love this house,” she says.
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