They cashed in. Now, they’re helping their kids.

Kathy Fitzgerald Sherman was only half joking when she attributed her real estate hot streak to a series of “dumb luck.”

In the late 1980s, she and her husband were able to purchase a five-bedroom house in Mountain View, California, despite having a lower bid than a foreign investor, she said, simply because their 3-month-old son, Sam, had charmed the seller during the open house.

The next stroke of good fortune: Google and the ensuing tech boom moved into the neighborhood several years later.

“There was no way to predict that our $500,000 house would end up being a $2 million house,” said her husband, Michael Sherman, 68. “It’s not like we were smart about that. It’s just we were here.”

Michael Sherman, a director at the Toyota Research Institute, and Kathy Sherman, a retired lawyer, have since moved twice, coming out ahead each time. They bought their current home, a brand-new, four-bedroom in Capitola, California, for $2 million but below market value as a result of postlockdown pricing. The estimated value of the house has appreciated by nearly $350,000 in three years, according to Zillow.

Right-place-right-time home investments have enabled older adults like the Shermans to accumulate equity over the years and improve their living situations — a financial model that has eluded many millennial and Generation Z aspiring homeowners, particularly those who live in expensive markets like the Bay Area. That equity, however, has allowed older homeowners to help their children join the club.

“We have a phenomenon here in San Francisco where the two primary forms of a first-time buyer’s down payment are either tech stock options or the Bank of Mom and Dad, sometimes a bit of both,” said Danielle Lazier, a real estate agent in San Francisco.

Lazier, who did not work with the Shermans, added that the city’s housing shortage has driven up prices and competition, encouraging parents to conduct “a wealth transfer ahead of time and also help their kids get started.”

It goes beyond the Bay Area. First-time homeowners in the United States made up only 24% of the market in 2024, down 8 percentage points from the year before, according to the National Association of Realtors. And a 2023 report from the association said that nearly a quarter of first-time homeowners had used a gift or loan from family or friends to assist with or cover the down payment.

Kimi Fry, an agent in Salt Lake City, estimated that the average down payment gift from parents of her clients is “anywhere from the $10,000 to the $25,000 range.”

The Shermans’ daughter, Leslie, 34, and her husband, Conrad Useldinger, 32, explored moving out of the pricey Bay Area to somewhere more affordable, like Oregon. But then her parents intervened, choosing to contribute $637,000 from their savings toward a down payment in 2024 on a two-bedroom, $850,000 condo in San Jose, California, for their daughter and son-in-law.

The Shermans hope the equity will provide enough financial stability to grow and hit life’s milestones sooner.

“By the time they’re ready to move up, they’ll be able to take the down payment that we have given them and reinvest that and handle a larger mortgage payment than they’re handling right now,” said Kathy Sherman, 69. “We’d love to have grandkids.”

If not for her parents propelling them forward financially, the Useldingers, who are currently going through IVF in hopes for a pregnancy, would “be paying rent until God knows when,” she said.

Bruce McMullin, a Salt Lake City resident, is another successful baby boomer who worries that his children are being left behind in a competitive real estate landscape. Utah had the ninth most expensive housing market in the United States last year, according to a report by the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah. The state’s average home price was $547,700, making it difficult for workers — many in their 30s and 40s — to attain first-time homeownership without help from their parents.

A former local real estate developer, McMullin, 76, once built 600 homes on a 225-acre parcel purchased from the Latter-day Saints. But his most recent real estate transactions served as investments of a different kind.

In 2022, he sold one of his investment properties, a two-bedroom, $470,000 town house in Midvale, Utah, where his son Sam McMullin lived and had partial ownership (around 40%). Conducting a 1031 exchange — which allows investors to avoid capital gains tax by swapping one property for another within 90 days — they used the combined equity, along with additional funds provided by Bruce McMullin and his wife, Jean, 75, to upgrade to a five-bedroom, $610,000 house in American Fork, Utah, with Sam’s name solely on the title.

Bruce McMullin’s cumulative six-figure financial contribution has enabled Sam, who works in automotive warranties, to afford a $100,000 mortgage with manageable $1,000 monthly payments and have a space for his young family to grow.

“I doubt seriously he would ever be able to get into a home,” McMullin bluntly said of Sam’s homeownership prospects. “With this leg up that I’ve been able to provide for him, he’s got a home. He doesn’t have to work two or three jobs. He can spend time with his wife and his child.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.