Photos: Courtesy Laura Gonzalez and Ritchie Metzier EQUITY TRUMPS ENGAGEMENT: Laura Gonzales (center) and her boyfriend, Tobin McKenna (left), are in the market to buy a home as an investment—not to settle down—with the help of Ritchie Metzler (right), their Realtor with Portland, Ore.-based Urban Pacific Real Estate.

It's estimated that females will head more than 31 million households by 2010. In the past, many female heads of households ended up in that role because they were widowed or divorced. WINKs today are able to throw down for big-ticket items—and do so with striking regularity.

According to a CNN Technology study, women spend more on technology than men, doling out approximately $55 billion on consumer electronics in 2005 while men spent nearly 25.5 percent less at roughly $41 billion.

WINKs were brought up in a credit-crazy world and are accustomed to having high levels of debt, from student loans to car payments to credit card balances. It makes them better prepared mentally to commit to a mortgage, according to Suzanne Horton, CEO of Be Jane, a leading home improvement Web site geared specifically toward the growing number of women homeowners.

“Women are the fastest-growing segment in business in the U.S., and we have more aggregate spending power than any other group,” Horton says. “Home builders better sit up and start paying attention to these women. What women want is what builders should be building.”

When it comes to habitat, Gen-Y puts the models that worked for home builders, urban planners, and city leaders catering to their parents' generation to the test.

“They have a very different view on how they want to lead their lives and what they value,” Horton says. “And it's playing out the most when it comes to deciding where they want to live.”

Home builders looking to tap the Gen-Y market can all but kiss the suburban model with sprawling subdivisions and three-car garages goodbye, at least as this group enters the housing market. Gen-Yers aren't looking to hide behind privacy walls, nor are they interested in golf course-sized backyards.

This generation, more than any other, wants to be at the heart of the action—nestled in downtown areas, urban cores, and urbanlite environments. According to a report published by real estate trendspotters Robert Charles Lesser & Co., 77 percent of Gen-Yers prefer to live in an urban core, a preference that manifests itself at even greater levels among WINKs.

Eighty-seven percent of WINKs surveyed said they'd prefer to live in an urban or urban-lite environment, and more than 95 percent said they would make their housing choice based on whether or not they could walk to work.

Granted, it was the Baby Boom that gentrified declining neighborhoods in many U.S. cities throughout the 1970s and 1980s, only to eventually grow up to embrace the McMansion concept. In a similar vein, many Gen-Yers also started out as urban pioneers but are now living in the close-in suburbs vacated by retiring boomers.