I was taking a look at my list of San Francisco clients that are looking for a home or have recently purchased a home and I realized that about 35% of them are single women. 

While it does appear that I tend to work with more single female home buyers than national averages, across the country, I did find some interesting statistics while searching the net:

Not bad for girl power, eh?

The demographic includes all women, including never married, divorced or widowed. 

Each person’s motivations for buying a home is, without a doubt, different. 

Past generations waited for Mr. Right to come along and give the poor helpless female financial security. 

But TODAY’S woman is ready to take her financial destiny into her own hands.  According to an older article from USA Today:

The trend is striking, because in 1981, the number of single women and single men home buyers was virtually the same. Since then, the percentage of buyers who are single women has almost doubled, while the percentage of single men buyers slipped 1 percentage point to 9% last year.

The article goes on to say:

“For the first time in history, women have access to the same resources men have always had — money, social status, power,” says Donald Hantula, professor of organizational psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia.

“Women can go and acquire them on their own rather than searching for a mate to provide them. These demographic and social changes are not in line with how we adapted in the hunter-gatherer era.”

In SF, women have a number of options when it comes to buying a home.  My clients’ searches have included houses, condos, TIC’s, lofts, fixer-uppers, new construction, Victorian architecture, modern design and so many other variables that there’s just too many to list.  

And now that we are seeing some better deals in the San Francisco housing market, I’ve been getting more calls from single women ready to take the plunge and buy a home.  In fact, now that the real estate prices have softened in SF, I’ve gotten calls from some past single female clients that are ready to jump in and buy investment property, with a big enough down payment, they are actually able to see a positive net gain on a rental property in San Francisco.

If you’re a single woman and you’re thinking about buying property in San Francisco, whether for your primary residence or for investment purposes, give me a holler – I’m happy to help you decide whether now really is the right time for you to buy.