Joynt Co-Ownership Platform

Housing Affordability Is Forcing People to Get Creative

• Housing affordability is at its worst in decades, and buying alone isn't realistic for a lot of people anymore.

• The median age of a first-time homebuyer hit a record high of 40 in 2025, and the share of first-time buyers fell to a record-low 21 percent, according to the National Association of Realtors.

• People who can't buy alone keep renting instead, paying every month into something they'll never own a piece of.

• Pooling resources with friends or family is becoming less of a lifestyle choice and more of a practical necessity, but the tools to do it responsibly haven't caught up.

Getting to the Purchase Is Its Own Battle

• Most groups don't stall because people lose interest, they stall because co-buying is a coordination problem, not a motivation problem.

• Conversations happen across scattered channels, group texts, Zillow links, the occasional call, with no shared place to track any of it, so momentum quietly dies.

• The groups that do get moving run into the same unanswered questions: how do you find an agent who actually understands co-buying, which lenders will finance a group of unrelated buyers, and what legal structure actually protects everyone.

Without Guidance, Groups Skip the Protection They Need

• Because there's no clear guidance on those questions, a lot of groups skip the legal structure entirely just to keep the deal moving.

• That means closing on a home together with no real protection in place: no documented ownership shares, no agreed-upon decision process, nothing to fall back on if the relationship changes.

The Cracks Show Up After Move-In

• Friendships that felt solid going into the purchase can come apart under the weight of actually sharing ownership.

• There's often no exit strategy if one person wants out, no agreed-upon plan for what happens to their share.

• There's also no plan for the quieter version of that problem: someone doesn't want out, they just can't keep paying anymore because of a job loss, a move, a health issue, or a divorce, and the group is left deciding informally whether to cover them.

• Managing shared finances gets messy fast without a dedicated system built for it.

• The decisions that matter most tend to get argued out, or avoided, in a group text, with no real way to reach a consensus everyone can live with.

The Users

Prospective Co-Buyers

These are people trying to figure out if co-owning a home is actually realistic for their specific situation, and they span nearly every generation, for different reasons.

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• Gen Z (born 1997 to 2012, so currently about 14 to 29 years old):
  Nearly a third say they're considering co-buying with friends or family, more than any other generation. For them it's almost always about a primary residence, pooling with roommates or close friends because it's often the only realistic way into the market at all.

• Millennials (born 1981 to 1996, so currently about 30 to 45):
  Older millennials, in their late thirties and early forties, are buying multigenerational homes at a rising rate, and more than a third of them are doing it specifically to help care for an aging parent. Younger millennials lean more toward the friend-based version of co-buying, splitting a primary home the same way Gen Z does, just a few years further into their careers.

• Gen X (born 1965 to 1980, so currently about 46 to 61):
  Gen X has the highest rate of multigenerational home purchases of any generation, nearly double what it was a decade ago. Cost savings is the leading reason people give today, and a lot of Gen X parents are past just helping with a down payment, they want to actually co-own the home with their kids, not just fund it from the sidelines.

• Boomers (born 1946 to 1964, so currently about 62 to 80):
  Boomers still buy multigenerational homes at a meaningful rate, though that share has been shrinking as more choose to age in place instead. When boomers do co-buy, it's often to move in with or near adult children, or to combine resources with family on a shared vacation property instead of maintaining two homes separately.

• Across all of them, most co-ownership groups include either friends, relatives, or a mix of both, and the average group has grown to between three and four people. Whatever the mix, nearly everyone is working through the same short list of questions before they buy: what kind of property, primary home, vacation home, or investment, what legal structure protects everyone, and whether the group is actually aligned on money and long-term plans.

Existing Co-Owners

Existing co-owners are largely the same mix of friends, relatives, and multigenerational families as the group above, just years further into the relationship. The question they're asking has changed: it's no longer whether co-owning is a good idea, it's how to make it keep working. Like most first-time co-buyers, they're not particularly sophisticated about real estate law or shared finances, they're everyday people who found a creative path into homeownership and are now living with that decision, sometimes for years or decades, while their own lives keep moving around them: new jobs, new cities, growing families.