Everything is less affordable nowadays. For everyone. Not just the young. Teens no longer work part time jobs. Those job got filled by low educated adults and retired elderly who couldn't survive otherwise.

People in a house are sitting either because they had a great interest rate from a few years back or because the cost of housing has skyrocketed far behind anything reasonable.

We are inspecting over 1000 homes a year. I don't know the true statistics and I do know Alabama is an outlier from the rest of the country. But my guess would be 30% of my clients are 1st time. Another 30% are older people either upsizing or downsizing. The remainder are a mix of previous owners who are relocating, upsizing, or investors. I guess I could start collecting that data, but I don't want that much extra work to keep up with.

My son is 28 and on his 2nd home. He's saving to pay cash for his next and never plans to own another payment on anything for the rest of his life. The entire system is designed to suck the money out of you at every turn. Couple that will poor decision making and it's a recipe for disaster.

As for the home sales market in my region, it's booming. We are at around 400 inspections so far this year and turning away more work than we take on. It's been this way for us for a couple of years now. Meanwhile, it appears there are fewer and fewer decent inspectors still in business. The industry will chew up and spit out the ones who don't know their profession or don't know how to perform customer service the right way.

Character is not developed in moments of temptation and trial. That is when it is intended to be used.