“I’m ready to buy,” a longtime friend recently told me. “I’m finally ready.”

Jane (not her real name), a single woman in her early 40s, was no financial wallflower. She’d been kicking career booty for as long as I’d known her and socking away her extra dough. Yet despite an ample income (and no expensive habits like Jimmy Choo shoes, crack or children), she’d stayed on the sidelines of the housing market.

What kept her renting? A certain kind of financial caution and a feeling that the market was too insane to participate in. But now that things seemed to be settling down, she feels the time is right.

In fact, Jane is catching a real estate trend that has been swelling for years. Single women are buying homes at record rates — and everyone seems to be taking notice.

In 2000-03, single women spent $550 billion on real estate nationally. The National Association of Realtors identified this rich vein of buyers when they discovered that in 2002, twice as many single women as single men bought their first homes. Builders and developers have also begun marketing to these women because they comprise about 30 percent of all condo purchasers.

With neither the homemaking pressures of married-couple culture nor the hefty incomes of single men (according to federal labor statistics, women still earn only 80 cents on the dollar), why would so many single women mortgage their future for a pile of wood and plaster?

Many articles — including a New York Times story about women buying condos in Brooklyn — have painted a picture of the female home buyer as the new darling of real estate. These articles cite such reasons as the importance of nesting for women, their tendency to plan for the future and their new buying power. In short, they tout the trend as a sign of women’s newfound fiscal independence finding expression in their homemaking urges.

But “Buying for Themselves,” a new study from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, suggests that the trend in single women buying homes is more a matter of simple demographics than essentialist stereotypes.

The study, which looked at 18 million home buyers between 2000 and 2003, found that single women accounted for 20 percent of home buyers, while single men made up 17 percent. Such factors as high divorce rates (with women exiting marriages with hefty chunks of equity), women waiting longer to get married and women’s rising salaries all contribute to more single women deciding to buy a home on their own. As for the nesting instinct, because 30 percent of these single female home buyers live with their children, it may be more a practical matter of creating a stable home life than a genetic predisposition toward throw pillows.

Bonnie Spindler, an agent with San Francisco’s Zephyr Real Estate, has long observed that many of her clients were single women like her. But last year, she began marketing to them specifically — teaching a class at the Learning Annex about the benefits and possibilities of homeownership for single women.

At 42, Spindler epitomizes all that’s advantageous about single women owning real estate. Since she purchased her first home at age 23, she has ridden two huge waves of appreciation and watched much of her stock portfolio plummet in the 2000 bust. “Thank God I had real estate,” she laughs. “I rode Enron, Tyco and WorldCom all the way to the bottom without so much as a call from my broker.” In contrast, she says, her real estate holdings — multiple investment properties as well as her home — have gone up 500 percent in value in the past 10 years.

Her single female clients, who range in age from 23 to 75, also offer a snapshot of the demographics of local female home buyers. “They are professionals, mostly: lawyers, CPAs, advertising executives, entrepreneurs,” she says. “They also come from all over the world.”

Spindler says her clients’ taste in homes tends to run more toward safety and community, with a preference for stable urban areas over “fringy, up-and-coming neighborhoods” that might afford more space but less convenience or security. “They are more likely to buy into new buildings, with security systems, guards, front-door man, camera and things like built-in gyms,” she says. “They often buy condos or partner together to buy TICs.”

Even among her married clients, Spindler says, she’s seen a shift toward women taking the real estate reins. “Many of them are the breadwinners, so they are the primary buyers. The man’s not on the loan, because he doesn’t add anything.”

But amid all the rosy images of women doin’ it for themselves (and sometimes their men), there’s also a picture that troubles me — one that is embodied by my dear friend Jane and her eagerness to get into the market now.

From what I could gather — looking at both the Harvard study and the National Association of Realtors’ research — single women represent a growing share of all home buyers. According to the Harvard study, in the past eight years single women have increased their share of the market by 50 percent. A study released earlier this year by the Realtors group suggests that the number of single female home buyers has jumped since 2003.

It’s tempting to see the entry of so many single women into the real estate market as a sign of women’s financial liberation, but in a market that seems to be in a decline, that might be unwise.

Just as the Beardstown Ladies Investment Club led to a lucrative publishing deal in the mid-1990s, the thousands of copycat clubs that came late to the party had less to celebrate. (In the end, the club was exposed for hyping their profits and their publisher was successfully sued.)

The point is that a woman who bought a two-bedroom condo in 2000 would have experienced enough appreciation to insulate herself from a serious market correction. But now that the market has slowed, should we be applauding every woman who decides to borrow from her 401(k) to buy that same two-bedroom condo?

Part of me doesn’t want to discourage my friend Jane. When people want to buy a home, a lot of private stars need to be in alignment, regardless of the marketplace. And in the long run, owning a home has many financial and psychological advantages. But I also can’t help but see all the talk of this growing group of single women buyers as fodder for real estate spin. Sure it’s great for women to own their own homes. But I worry that the most vulnerable sectors of society — single women and minorities (another growing group of home buyers) — are now deciding the time is right, just when the market is softening.

Lisa Thompson, a San Francisco agent who has also given workshops for single women buyers, says that the women she met at her recent seminar expressed caution about some real estate practices and the financial dangers of owning a home. “They asked a lot about predatory lending,” she recalls. “We also talked a lot about getting comfortable with the responsibility and liability issues as homeowners. There’s a fear factor.”

In a booming market, such caution might deserve to be dispelled. In this market, it may be the better part of valor.

E-mail Carol Lloyd at surreal@sfgate.com.

Source:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/17/REGBFMVTEE1.DTL