Homeownership is slipping out of reach for a growing share of Americans and the usual headline numbers are glossing over how far the trend has gone. For investors who think about the for-sale and rental markets as one system, a new Apartment List report suggests the country may already be well into a structural shift toward renting and multi-generational living.
Apartment List, using Census Bureau Current Population Survey data, finds that just 59 percent of adults over 25 owned a home in 2025, with the adult homeownership rate falling by 50 basis points in each of the last two years. By contrast, the conventional statistic most people quote—the household homeownership rate—still shows about 65 percent of households as owner-occupied, only about a point lower than in 2023.
That gap is the heart of the story: counting households makes the market look relatively steady, while counting actual adults shows a more meaningful slide.
The difference comes down to who "counts" as a homeowner. Standard measures treat the housing unit as the reference point and focus on the head of household, which means everyone else under that roof is effectively invisible to the metric.
Apartment List highlights that more than 27 million adults over 25 now live in someone else's owner-occupied home—parents, relatives or other hosts—but are not owners themselves. In traditional data, those adults are folded into existing owner households; in the individual-level view, they appear as non-owners who have not yet formed owner households of their own.
To build their adult homeownership rate, the researchers classify the head and spouse in an owner-occupied home as owners and everyone else as non-owners. It's a blunt instrument that may mis-assign ownership inside some households, but it captures a clear directional shift: the number of non-owning adults living in owner homes has grown large enough to pull down the overall rate of ownership when you measure it by people rather than units.
That is why the adult rate has drifted toward its post–Great Financial Crisis low from 2017, even as the household rate has rebounded to levels above the early 1990s.
Young adults are where this shows up most starkly—and where it matters most for long-term capital. Only 30 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds owned a home in 2025, the lowest share since at least 1976, when comparable records begin. Half of this age group rents, while roughly 20 percent—more than 9 million people—live in someone else's owned home. A generation ago, many of those adults would have been forming new owner households; today, a large share are "extra adults" in homes that official stats already count as owned.
The broader backdrop is familiar, but the report connects the dots in a way that matters for how investors interpret the data. Both the adult and household homeownership rates rose modestly in the late 2010s and into 2023, on the back of ultra-low interest rates and a pandemic-era buying boom. That boom also drove home prices sharply higher.
Yet, once mortgage rates reset upward, the typical monthly payment jumped, eroding affordability and shutting many would-be buyers out just as they were ready to enter the market. In Apartment List's telling, that affordability shock is what pushed the homeownership rate among adults back into decline.
For commercial real estate investors, the precise line between who in a household is actually on the mortgage is less important than the trajectory Apartment List is documenting. A household-level homeownership rate of around 65 percent can give the impression of a market bumping along within a normal historical range.
An adult-level rate sliding toward post-crisis lows, especially for younger cohorts, points to a larger pool of renters and delayed owners whose housing demand is being absorbed by rentals, shared housing and informal arrangements rather than by new owner stock.
In practical terms, the report underscores that the "missing owners" are not absent from the housing system—they are just showing up in places that the standard metric doesn't flag.
They are in Class B and C rentals, in single-family rentals and build-to-rent communities and in spare bedrooms in otherwise owner-occupied homes. The timing of when and whether those adults can cross over into homeownership will shape demand across those segments for years, even if the headline homeownership rate never moves much from where it is today.
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