SFH Single Female Homeowner
Did you know that until 1974, women couldn’t get a legally protected mortgage without a male co-signer? Now SFHs outnumber SMHs. 
In 1981, Dolly Parton topped the billboard charts with “9 to 5.” That year, the National Association of REALTORS® first started the Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, and a stunning finding was made: single women outpaced single men in the housing market. Single women were second only to married couples. Today, both Dolly Parton and single women home buyers are a force. Single women are surpassing all odds in the housing market and purchasing homes with lower household incomes in an increasingly unaffordable housing market. Let’s take a look at how they stack up compared to their single male counterparts.
What is striking about single women home buyers is that it was not until 1974 that women were legally protected to obtain a mortgage without a co-signer. Before the passage of the Fair Housing Act’s prohibitions against “sex” discrimination in housing-related transactions and the protections of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, it was commonplace for a widow to need a male relative as a co-signer. Under federal law, women had no legal recourse for this or any other lending discrimination.
In 1981, 73% of home buyers were married couples, 11% were single women and 10% were single men. Today, those shares stand at 59% married couples, 19% single women, and 10% single men. The highest share of single women buyers was in 2006 when the share stood at 22%. Between 2016 and 2022, the share of single women will be between 17% and 19%. In 2010, the share of single men rose to a high of 12% but has stayed between 7% and 9% of buyers in recent years.
In recent years, an easy explanation for the rise in single women buyers was the drop in the share of Americans who are married. Using Census data(link is external), in 1950, 23% of Americans ages 15 and up had never been married. In 2022, that share stands at 34% of Americans. That translates into 37.9 million one-person households in the US today—29% of all households.