With a historic low of 24 percent of home purchases last year made by first-time buyers, the personal-finance website WalletHub recently released its report on the “Best & Worst Cities for First-Time Home Buyers in 2025.”

To determine the most favorable housing markets for first-time buyers, WalletHub took the pulse of real estate in 300 cities of varying sizes using 22 key metrics. The data set ranged from housing affordability to real-estate tax rate to property-crime rate.

The results, as far as the best cities to purchase a home for first-time buyers were Palm Bay, Fla.; Boise, Idaho; Tampa, Fla.; Surprise, Ariz.; Huntsville, Ala.; Gilbert, Ariz. and Cape Coral, Orlando, Lakeland and Sunrise, Fla.

The worst cities to make that first home purchase were San Mateo, Calif.; New Orleans; Anchorage, Alaska, and Costa Mesa, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Monica and Berkeley, Calif.   

Best versus worst takeaways from the survey were:

• Flint, Mich., has the most affordable housing (median house price divided by median annual household income), which is 9.7 times cheaper than in Santa Barbara, Calif., the city with the least affordable housing.
• Honolulu has the lowest real-estate tax rate, which is 10 times lower than in Paterson, N.J., the city with the highest.
• Flint, Mich., has the highest rent-to-price ratio, which is 14 times higher than in Santa Monica, Calif., the city with the lowest.
• Baton Rouge, La. has the lowest total home-energy cost per month, which is 4.8 times lower than in Honolulu, the city with the highest.

“Buying a home for the first time is a very stressful and difficult process, especially when housing prices are through the roof and interest rates have risen sharply in the past few years,” WalletHub Analyst Chip Lupo said. “The best cities for first-time homebuyers not only are affordable both in terms of buying a house and living there afterward, but they also have a lot of housing choices as well as low crime rates and good schools.”

“Palm Bay, Fla., is the best city for first-time homebuyers. It’s among the leading cities in the country when it comes to active home listings per capita and new building permits per capita,” Lupo added. “Palm Bay has the fifth-highest millennial homeownership rate and the third-highest home appreciation rate in the country. Homebuyers with children will benefit from Palm Bay’s good school system.”