Not sure if the article said what the wife did for a living, nor if they had any kind of money from inheritance, etc. They may well not be looking for “starter” homes (not in that price range), so they have the right to be picky.
We had spent over 10 years looking at hundreds of houses, and finally found what we wanted at the right price. We have zero regrets. For you, it might not be desirable to spend a lot of time looking for a house, but for other people it is worth it, and very much so.
You also have to realize that many of the Baby Boomers didn’t have college degrees, and many of the working-class neighborhoods back then were filled with other people very much like themselves: decent, hard-working, but not wealthy or aspirational. They had simple, but fairly well-maintained homes in decent neighborhoods with fairly low crime rates. Today, many of those same neighborhoods have been taken over by gangs and people who do not have the same beliefs about maintaining their homes and neighborhoods, and are a major contributing factor to the higher crime rates.
If today’s first-time buyers are better educated and generally older as a result of putting off a home purchase because they’ve pursued their educations and have worked their way up in the corporate world, they will expect more than the 23 year-old mechanic and receptionist wife of years past. That does not make them more “entitled,” it just means that they expect to live in a home and neighborhood with other people who are similarly situated.
We have to remember that we are all different, and times have most certainly changed. There is no reason for today’s buyers to be bullied by idiotic realtors into over-paying for homes when all the cards are stacked against them by way of artificially suppressed interest rates and artificially constrained home inventories along with the deluge of “investors” competing with them because of the Federal Reserve’s dangerous attempts to prop up asset prices in the face of stagnant/declining wages.
