For decades, the American starter home had a simple formula. Three bedrooms, a yard, somewhere in the suburbs, priced at one or two times your household income. But that formula is dead.
Today’s entry point in most markets is around $300,000. For a two-bedroom. In a secondary market. Not San Francisco. Not Miami. A bedroom community where people commute to work and raise families.
That number locks out a massive group of buyers. Not people who are bad with money. People who work, earn, save and still can’t clear the bar.
So the question becomes: what does attainable homeownership actually look like in 2026?
Convert What Already Exists
Converting apartments into condos is the next thing in first-time home ownership. Take existing multifamily products, reposition the units for individual sale and target a $90,000 to $140,000 price point. One to three bedrooms. One to two baths.
That’s not a typo. Ninety thousand dollars for a first home.
The criteria matters. All single story. Washer-dryer connections. Dedicated parking right in front of your door. You pull up, you walk in, you’re home. No stairs. No neighbors above and below you. No laundromat runs.
It feels like a home because it functions like one.
We have a pipeline of six or seven of these projects right now. We launched one community recently and received six offers in a week. This is not a whiteboard idea. It’s happening.
Why It Works in This Cycle
The old playbook was built on appreciation. Buy, hold, wait for values to climb, refinance, repeat. That model worked when rates were low and capital was cheap.
Markets don’t care how long something has worked.
We’re in a different cycle now. Valuations have reset. Debt is more expensive. The investors still chasing the 2021 playbook are the ones getting hurt. The opportunities today require different
thinking. Condo conversion is one of the few strategies that works on both sides of the ledger: it produces investor returns and it creates housing people can actually afford.
That second part matters. This is the free market solving attainable housing. No subsidies. No government programs. People voting with their dollars.
In some of these communities, buyers are purchasing their first home for one to two times their annual income. We haven’t seen that kind of access point since the 1950s and ’60s. The homes are smaller. The lots are smaller. But the ownership is real.
The Financing Problem Nobody Talks About
Here’s the part that gets missed. Price isn’t the only barrier. Financing is.
A lot of potential buyers don’t have traditional credit profiles. No W-2s. No tax returns. Not because they don’t earn. Because they run cash businesses, work in trades, operate in the real economy where income doesn’t always show up on paper the way a bank wants it to.
Conventional lenders can’t touch them. FHA can’t touch them. So they stay renters, not because they can’t afford to buy, but because the system wasn’t designed for how they earn.
We partnered with a national mortgage company for conventional and FHA financing. That covers the buyers who fit the standard mold. But for the ones who don’t, we developed a seller financing product. No traditional credit requirements. Structured so the buyer builds equity from day one.
Of those six offers in our first week, half were seller financed. That ratio tells you something about where the real demand lives.
What This Solves
The housing affordability conversation has been stuck for years. Everybody agrees it’s a problem. Nobody agrees on the fix. Meanwhile, a generation of potential homeowners keeps renting.
Condo conversion doesn’t solve all of it. But it solves a specific, measurable piece. It takes existing housing stock, repositions it at a price point that’s actually reachable, and pairs it with financing that reflects how people actually earn.
The product exists. The demand exists. The capital structure works. What’s missing is scale.
Every secondary market with aging apartment stock and a priced-out buyer pool is a candidate. The playbook is replicable. We’re proving it now with six or seven projects in our pipeline, but the model isn’t proprietary. Anyone reading this can go do the same thing in their market.
The Real Opportunity
Homeownership is how most Americans build wealth. Not stocks. Not crypto. The house they live in. When you price an entire generation out of that, you’re not just creating a housing problem. You’re creating a wealth gap that compounds for decades.
A $90,000 condo in a bedroom community won’t make anyone rich. But it puts them on the ladder. It builds credit. It builds equity. It gives them something that appreciates while they sleep.
That’s what a starter home is supposed to do. We just forgot what one looks like.