Footloose and Mortgage-Free

When you hear statistics indicating that not only do single men buy homes at a far lower rate than their female counterparts, but that the gap has widened, it’s a good idea to corner a bachelor and ask him what, exactly, is going on. At first Chris Pape, a 30-year-old swinging renter in Boston, is flip. “So we can leave really quickly and no one can find us,” he says. But then he digs deeper. He and his buddies, he explains, would buy only as an investment or because they’re ready to settle down. “I think maybe that’s why I am a renter,” muses Pape, the head of PapeBoston, an online marketing firm. “I have the perception that when you buy a place, that’s when you talk about babies.”

In 2006, a mere 6 percent of home buyers in the state were single men, according to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, putting them behind not just married couples (60 percent) and unmarried couples (8 percent) but also unmarried women (24 percent). The only group less willing to make it permanent was “other,” at 2 percent.

While numbers exist showing that first-time male buyers in the Bay State have higher median incomes than their female counterparts ($70,000 vs. $56,000) and are younger (28 vs. 34), there are no data that get to the heart of the “confirmed renter” syndrome (which was slightly more pronounced here than in the United States as a whole last year). But there’s a theory. Oh, is there a theory.

“It’s commitment phobia,” says Judy Moses, president of Pathway Home Realty Group in Chestnut Hill. “A lot of them will never find ‘perfect,’ because that’s not really what the problem is. There is no perfect out there, whether it be a property or a sweetheart. You can’t expect a property to do the impossible, just like you can’t expect a person to. You take them with all their warts.”

Or you sign a lease.