The Latest Hot Item on Wedding Registries? A New House.

Push the blenders, cutlery sets and fine china aside.

Brides and grooms are more frequently adding a house fund to their wedding registries to raise cash to buy a home. Once a way to accrue household items, the wedding registry now enables newlyweds to jump-start their future together with what is likely to be one of the largest purchases of their lives.

In 2024, according to a survey conducted by the wedding website Zola, 87 percent of couples were planning to include cash funds as an option on their wedding registry. According to the Knot, another online wedding resource, the share of couples including a home fund on their registries has increased 62 percent since 2018. The house fund was the second-most-popular fund on the Knot this year after a honeymoon fund.

“It’s certainly on the up and up,” said Esther Lee, the deputy editor of the Knot. “And it’s because you’re seeing that millennials and Gen Z, they want a home, and this is just yet another avenue for purchasing a home.”

House funds can give couples an edge in a crushing housing market where homeownership has become increasingly inaccessible. Interest rates have dropped from previous highs, but many homeowners, hesitant to forgo lower rates, aren’t moving, creating a “rate-lock effect” that impedes first-time home buyers.

When Gigi Blanco and E.J. Kelley married in 2022, they included a house fund on their registry and received $20,000, said Ms. Blanco, 32, a public relations director at Douglas Elliman, a real estate company. The money helped them buy and close on a cozy, farmhouse-style three-bedroom home in Bedford Hills, N.Y.