Madeline Ables and Trevor Jackson settled into their two-story home near downtown Concord just in time for the holidays.
In the first few months in their new home, they’ve already painted the kitchen cabinets sage green and hung framed photos in nearly every room. A few boxes await unpacking in their shared home office space.
Ables, an Upper Valley native, and Jackson, originally from South Carolina, met at Franklin Pierce School of Law. They graduated in 2024 and knew they wanted to buy a home in Concord. Their wedding ceremony in July took place at White Park, just a few blocks away from where they live now.
Like most young first-time home buyers, the couple struggled with a high-priced real estate market with few homes for sale.
Their search began in late August after they lived in an apartment in the city for over three years. It was a fine place to live, but continuing to rent was like “pouring money down a funnel,” 31-year-old Ables said.
Even with a decent income as two young lawyers, affordable options were hard to find and the good ones were snapped up in the blink of an eye.
“As soon as they go on the market, they’re probably gone within two weeks, unless they’re drastically overpriced,” 27-year-old Jackson said.
That was another issue in their home search — the price. Ables and Jackson got their home for $400,000, an affordable option given the median sales price for homes in Merrimack County is $470,000.
They originally put an offer on another home listed for $580,000, which would have been a stretch since they had been pre-approved for a $540,000 mortgage. Ables said they were considering cutting back, saving up and moving money around.
“We sat down and did some really almost devastating math to see whether or not we could afford it,” she said.
As newlyweds, Ables and Jackson were still factoring wedding expenses into their financing mix when they were considering what a monthly payment would look like, including their mortgage, taxes and homeowners insurance.
“I think we both were kind of relieved, honestly, when we didn’t get it, because it would’ve been a massive strain,” Jackson added.
They love their new house on Essex Street, even if it does need a little work.
Even though the market is cooling, young families often have to fight hard to find a good home within their means. Some search farther away from where they want to live in search of cheaper options. Others feel priced out of the housing market completely, economically forced to remain renters.
New Hampshire has grappled with low housing inventory for nearly a decade. In the early 2010s, the market had between 8,000 and 13,000 homes available at any given time. Now, a little over 1,600 homes are on the market across the state, according to data from the New Hampshire Association of Realtors.
Joanie McIntire, a broker at Coldwell Banker and the couple’s agent, said the reason for the low inventory was that new properties stopped being built around 2008 because of the market collapse. Construction projects were losing value before being finished.
“Builders really cut back on what what they were building,” she said. “It did not make financial sense.”
Even when the market picked back up, inventory kept dropping.
One overarching issue, McIntire said, is New Hampshire’s zoning laws. About 66 municipalities will not allow a single-family home to be built on less than 1.5 acres, and some have even broader restrictions, according to the New Hampshire Zoning Atlas from Saint Anslem College.
Most of the young couples McIntire works with don’t want to maintain a big home and yard, but “little postage stamp” lots are hard to come by.
“If you have a 10-acre lot, and you could build 20 houses on it, we could increase our inventory so much,” she said. “There’s hardly any place in the state that you can build on under two acres, there just isn’t.”
Once demand outpaced supply, home prices started to rise. The Association of Realtors reported that the median sales price of a single-family home in December 2025 was $520,000, a 2.1% increase from 2024 and an over 12% increase from 2023.
Housing can be less expensive to the north and west, but in Rockingham County near the seacoast, the median price for a home is $670,000.
“Even with a 10 percent down payment, a family would need an income of roughly $190,000 to purchase that home. That’s an unrealistic threshold for most working families,” Josh Geenwald, the owner of Greenwald Realty Group in Keene and the president of the Association of Realtors, said in a statement.
As a result, first-time home-buyers are getting older: Real estate agents report that many clients looking for their initial property are in their late 30s or early 40s.
“A lot of younger people, they might have good paying jobs, but not a lot of disposable income,” Greenwald said in an interview. “Without help from, say, other sources like parents to help them get into the game, it’s difficult.”
Greenwald said he feels hopeful for the future of the market because trends have already shown improvement in the last few years — but it is slow.
“It’s kind of like you’re looking at the storm and you see a break in the clouds,” he said. “I would think that, with everyone in New Hampshire focused on the same thing, in the legislature and municipalities, on increasing the housing stock … it’s just going to get better and better over the next couple years.”
Sixteen pro-housing bills were passed in the State House last year. Among them was a law allowing accessory dwelling units, which are usually tiny houses that can be attached or detached to a single-family home. Another allowed residential units to be built in commercial zones, giving people a chance to live closer to where they work.
McIntire said, however, a lot of those bills are under the threat of being repealed in this legislative session.
“We’re doing a really good job on the defensive and trying to make the point, make the argument that we haven’t even seen the fruits of those bills yet,” she said. “Let’s give them a chance and see if they’ll work.”
The house that Ables and Jackson bought, built in 1900, is definitely a fixer-upper — some electrical work needs to be sorted out and they eventually need to replace the 20-year-old roof. But the couple admitted that they like having a house that needs some TLC.
“We didn’t want a perfect house,” Jackson said. “We wanted something that we could do, a project here or there. We wanted to make it our own.”