Gen Z is now showing up in roughly one in five mortgage purchase requests nationwide, yet where those young buyers actually land is all over the map. Midwestern and smaller metros are grabbing the biggest shares, while high-cost coastal cities are still a tough nut to crack. San Francisco is the oddball: relatively few Gen Z applicants overall, but a sharp year-over-year jump among those who do manage to get in the door.
Where Gen Z Is Concentrated
A national analysis found that Gen Zers accounted for 19.9% of mortgage purchase requests across the 50 largest metros in a two-year window ending Dec. 31, 2025. Minneapolis topped the list at 26.4%, followed by Birmingham at 25.7% and Indianapolis at 24.6%. The same study showed a 9.9% nationwide rise in Gen Z homebuying activity from 2024 to 2025, according to LendingTree.
Coastal Cities Still Hard To Crack
High-cost metros are lagging badly. Miami came in at 12.4%, while San Francisco and Las Vegas both posted Gen Z shares of just 12.8%. In these markets, younger buyers are staring down much larger average loan amounts and down payments, making getting that first set of keys much harder.
San Francisco’s Gen Z crowd in particular is contending with an average requested loan of $621,577 and an average down payment of $140,005, according to FOX 13 Tampa Bay. In other words, buying into the Bay is still a very expensive hobby.
What Gen Z Buyers Look Like
National reporting and industry data suggest Gen Z buyers are more practical than flashy, often stitching together savings, assistance programs and tight budgets to make homeownership work. The National Association of Realtors told NPR that Gen Zers are more likely than other generations to lean on down-payment assistance and that a sizable share of recent Gen Z buyers were single women.
Those buyer profiles help explain why affordability, rather than coastal cool factor, is driving many Gen Z moves, according to NPR.
San Francisco's Mixed Signals
San Francisco neatly captures the split. The city still has a relatively low share of Gen Z buyers, yet it logged one of the sharpest year-over-year jumps in Gen Z activity at 33.9%, and it reported the highest average Gen Z credit score among metros at 699. Those numbers, paired with those steep down payments, suggest that the Gen Z buyers who do break into San Francisco are an unusually credit-strong subgroup, per LendingTree.
A similar pattern was flagged in 2023, when a prior study found younger buyers were largely steering clear of San Francisco for more affordable options elsewhere; for background, see Hoodline.
For agents, city officials and renters watching from the sidelines, the takeaway is pretty straightforward: Gen Z is more active than a lot of people expected, but their wallets are still calling the shots. Local prices, available inventory and any policy tools that lower the bar for first-time buyers will keep shaping where they land. As those pieces move, the Gen Z homeownership map is likely to keep shifting right along with them.
