"WE STILL CAN'T AFFORD HOUSES IN UTAH": Insights on the challenges for young prospective homebuyers, from high prices to interest rates.

• Author: Beers, Heather
• Position: ECONOMIC OUTLOOK

Dejan Eskic and his wife were ready to make the leap from renting to buying, but once they started looking, they realized it wasn't going to be easy. With home prices rising, Eskic says he and his wife ended up living with in-laws for 18 months to find the right home and save up enough money.

The Eskics are not alone. With current home prices and interest rates, the leap from renting to homeownership can feel like a widening chasm, leaving young people wondering if they'll ever be able to buy a home of their own.

To get an idea of where things have been and where they are now, the median home price in Salt Lake County in 2019 was $342,000. As of June 2022, that number was $630,000, according to Dave Anderton, communications director for the Salt Lake Board of Realtors. That 84 percent increase is a doozy for Gen Z and Millennials who want to make like all the Gen X-ers and Boomers did and own a home in their 20s or 30s.

ICYMI, 2020-2022 was a challenging time--all starting with the pandemic. "When COVID started taking hold in March of 2020, we saw homebuyers pull back," Anderton says. "We thought for sure that 2020 was going to be a year when we went into a recession ... But by that summer, things turned right around. I don't know if COVID had much to do with it--people deciding they didn't want to live in the city or move to another state--but we saw sales explode."

In July 2020, Anderton says, Salt Lake County saw the most home sales ever. Home prices continued to climb throughout 2021 and into 2022.

The competition was so fierce that a home could go on the market and there would be several, if not dozens, of offers within hours. Homes were selling within one to three days rather than a few weeks.

Then there was what Andrea Chapman Summerhays and Greg Summerhays, realtors with Chapman Richard and Associates, call the "appraisal gap." Buyers were offering up to tens of thousands of dollars over a home's appraisal value just to beat out other offers.

The Summerhays, who work as a husband-and-wife team, were able to get their younger clients into homes during the wild days of 2020 through early 2022, but not without a lot of patience and ingenuity. "In that market, our buyers needed three buckets: down payment money, money to pay up and over the appraisal, and money for closing costs," Greg says. "We played around with those buckets of money. Maybe we would put a little less on the down payment and utilize some of their savings to pay the...