“She actually showed me her apartment, and she showed me what you could do with it,” Ms. Wegenaar said. “It felt so right.”

Obi Onyejekwe

It can be harder to find what feels right for buyers who don’t want to stray far from Manhattan’s most central neighborhoods. When Obi Onyejekwe moved from Atlanta in 2003 to work as an art director, producing commercials for SpikeTV, he thought he would quickly be able to buy an apartment with the $50,000 he had saved.

Mr. Onyejekwe (pronounced on-yeh-JECK-weh) had been saving and investing in a 401(k) since his first $7 an hour job at J. C. Penney. After college, he saved more than half of his salary from his early jobs by living at his mother’s home in Atlanta.

So when he arrived in Manhattan, he was determined to save and buy even while making less than $100,000 a year. He rented an $800-a-month apartment in Harlem and limited nights out to once a week. He spent less than $6 a day for lunch in SpikeTV’s cafeteria. While he never entirely stopped dating — an expense he calculated could cost him $400 a month — he said that he kept his eye on the larger goal of homeownership.

“It’s great to date, go out and have fun,” said Mr. Onyejekwe, 30. “But you have to be established first.”

He soon found it was harder to save in Manhattan than in Atlanta, especially as he made friends. In 2004, he moved to a $1,350-a-month one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen to be closer to his friends. He also found himself going out three or four nights a week. He considered moving to Brooklyn, where he could afford to buy, but he wanted to hold out for something centrally located in Manhattan. Karen Fornash, his sales agent at the Corcoran Group, helped him narrow his search.

He finally saved enough by making friends with people at work who shared his obsession of buying their own apartments. They chose to eat out at places with entrees that never cost more than $15 and went to events like the Warm Up dance parties at P.S. 1, where the only thing they bought was beer. They also became regulars at a bar near Times Square where they could get five drinks for the price of four.