Hello, Young Buyers!

Amid concern on New York's Long Island that the real-estate boom has priced out young couples and families, Newsday throws down an article showing how many 20-somethings have managed to buy a place of their own. The heart of the piece is the data, often cited here, showing that Gen-Y has become a large part of the suburban housing market. "The homeownership rate for people under age 25 jumped from 19.3 percent in 1982 to 23.6 percent as of the first quarter 2006," it says, citing U.S. census reports. "For buyers between the ages of 25 and 29, the homeownership rate rose from 38.6 percent to 41.0 percent for the same time period." Behind the trend is the increased safety of loaning to untried borrowers, thanks to improved tools for measuring who's a risk, and the emergence of the secondary mortgage market, which allows small banks to reduce their exposure by selling their mortgages to bigger institutions. Another help are piggyback loans—mostly in the form of home-equity loans—that allow cash-poor buyers to finance 100 percent of the cost of their new homes.

But the 20-somethings in the article say affording a home means more than being savvy about credit. "Things will definitely be tighter," says a 26-year-old homeowner, "It's going to be a lot of tuna fish in the beginning."

The Newsday story includes a 5-point sidebar on smart home investing.