Gen Zers often have multiple streams of income. What happens when they buy a house?

When this Gen-Z couple started house-hunting, they had one goal: To live within walking distance of their family.

Not settling for anything less, Grace Mary Williams, 26, and her fiance, Joe Fouad, 28, ended up searching for that house for two years. They even ruled out one home that was a 12-minute drive from Williams' family.

"I was like, no, it's too far," Williams said.

It narrowed down their search radius to about 2 miles, said their real estate agent Justine Nerzig, of Howard Hanna Coach in Dix Hills.

Then, they found it: A four-bedroom, three-bathroom home on a quiet street in Huntington, sitting on a spacious lot, three minutes from Williams' mother's house. The couple closed on their first home for $820,000 last December.

Gen-Z Long Islanders often work more than one job. Some of those jobs provide untraditional streams of income, said one real estate agent who has several clients in this age group. That includes Williams, a content creator and small business owner.

But even with a career in content creation, which can provide varied income month to month, these prospective homebuyers will not face additional challenges toward being approved for a mortgage, experts said.

And for Williams, house-hunting took time, persistence, and then, "we hit it at the perfect time," she said.

Millions of followers, plus one small business

The buyers

Grace Mary Williams, 26, and Joe Fouad, 28

What they got

4-bedroom, 3-bathroom house in Huntington

What they paid

$820,000

Williams, a Huntington native, has 2.7 million followers on TikTok and her own company, Slimes By Grace. She creates the stretchy, sensory toys of various hues and scents with an industrial mixer, which is stored at her mother's house. She also recently launched a collaboration with another slime brand that will be sold nationwide at Walmart.

Williams studied biochemistry in college before pivoting to business, and started her company in 2015. Like many content creators, her TikTok took off around the pandemic.

"I basically have two full-time jobs," she said. On TikTok, she works with various brands on advertising campaigns and video reviews.

"It's a lot to balance the two. It's a lot of not going out Friday or Saturday nights," Williams said. "I traded the 9-to-5 to work 12 hours a day, but I wouldn't have it any other way, because I love it."

Williams and her fiance, who works as an acupuncturist and a lifeguard at Jones Beach, were able to purchase their home without any monetary gifts, Williams said: "With the house, it was all us."

Finding their home

During their search, "a lot of the houses needed a lot of work," Williams said.

"Our original budget, we wanted to stay around $700,000 to $750,000, but every single house that we looked at would need at least $50,000 to $100,000 worth of work," she said. "Whether it was new bathrooms, new floors, whatever it was."

Their initial budget was

$700,000 to $750,000

but Williams said they found many homes that required

'at least $50,000 to $100,000 worth of work.'

Nerzig has worked with three sets of Gen-Z clients so far this year, and noticed that they hit their milestones in a different order than she did growing up.

"When I was coming up, we got married and then we looked for a house," Nerzig said. "Now, it's couples that are engaged or becoming engaged, looking for a home first."

Although the age group is excited and invested in the homebuying process, she said, they often come in with a disadvantage: Not having saved enough for a down payment.

Not that many parents actually have the money to just buy a house for their kids anymore, which was possible when I was growing up, because houses cost $100,000 and not $700,000.

— Justine Nerzig, Howard Hanna Coach agent

"Not that many parents actually have the money to just buy a house for their kids anymore, which was possible when I was growing up, because houses cost $100,000 and not $700,000," Nerzig said. "That's been a challenge."

The couple looked at about 10 houses during their two-year search, within a short distance to Williams' family in Huntington, and not too far from Fouad's family in Dix Hills. They were outbid twice by cash buyers, Williams said.

Then, when she and Fouad came across their current house, Nerzig encouraged them to take another look as it continued to stay on the market. The sellers had an accepted offer fall through, which gave the couple a brief window to jump in and make a bid for $30,000 below the asking price.

The fact that the couple had seen the house before and then were able to get their foot back in the door was a key to their success, Nerzig said.

"That's a rare one, though," she added. "It was like a miracle. But they're very lucky young people."

Is it hard to buy a house as a content creator?

The couple was able to provide a down payment of 20%, with a mortgage rate of 6%, in part because they both lived with their parents for as long as they could instead of renting a place together.

"We spent two years looking, saving and budgeting, making sure we were able to pull it off," Williams said. Being on her parents' health insurance (before turning 26) and not having a car payment were also big factors in her ability to save.

I know a lot of people want to take the jump and become a full-time content creator, but it's very hard if you like stability.

— Grace Mary Williams

Having multiple streams of income was also important, although working in social media doesn't always offer steady pay.

"I know a lot of people want to take the jump and become a full-time content creator, but it's very hard if you like stability," Williams said. "One month you might have one brand deal, or you might have 10 brand deals, or you might not have a brand deal for four months. So in that, you have to make sure that you're budgeting, to make sure you can save."

Tyler Revan and Matthew Vasconcellos work for Madison Mortgage in Garden City. They estimated that roughly one-quarter of their team's clients were Gen-Z first-time homebuyers this year. While many work as nurses and police officers in Vasconcellos' experience, he said he also recently closed a loan for a content creator.

"They're just treated as a normal, self-employed borrower," Vasconcellos said. "They still need to claim that income on their tax returns, and we're always going to look at an average of the last two years of tax returns."

There are other ways to qualify, for example, 12-month bank statement loan programs, he said. As for clients with multiple streams of income, the process can get tricky depending on how each business is filed, but not impossible.

"If they file those multiple streams of income under multiple businesses, it's just additional paperwork on our end and it's not the end of the world," Vasconcellos said. "It's just now we have to analyze each individual business, see how they're trending and what the average looks like."

For young business owners, getting organized is essential: "The biggest thing we tell all our clients is to keep your finances clean and documented," Revan said. "So separating your accounts, like your business and your personal accounts, tracking your income and making sure everything is outlined prior."

Nerzig's young clients — and her own children in this age group — work multiple jobs, noting that Williams' "go-getter" attitude is common and impressive to see in Gen-Z Long Islanders.

"They want to travel, they want to have money," Nerzig said. "I definitely see a different mold there. They're ready to go for things."

The couple is getting married in August, and they are determined to DIY as much around their home as possible, with Fouad already tackling some shelves and closets. They've also created a home office, where Williams can film videos.

But the landscaping requires some professional work: They are expecting to spend around $25,000 on their backyard, which includes fencing, Williams said.

But to be surrounded by family — for the happy couple, that's priceless.

"I'm going to need a village when I, one day, hopefully have kids," Williams said. "And I'm very close with my family. I can't imagine not having them around the corner."

Have you recently bought a house on Long Island — or are you in the middle of the buying process now? Email your success story to rachel.weiss@newsday.com.