The faster you buy your first home, the better, says real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran. As she tells CNBC Make It, "you've got to get in the game."

That said, she recognizes that home prices are high and getting higher. That's partly why, if you can be flexible about location, she suggests you consider buying in a city that can give you bang for your buck: Nashville, Tennessee.

That's Corcoran's top choice for young home-buyers. "Everybody seems to want to live in New York, L.A. or Washington … but you're barking up the wrong tree because it's so expensive," she says.

It's places like Nashville "where you're going to make the most money when you go to sell, five years, 10 years out," she adds. There, "for $295,000, you can get a three-bedroom house. ... Also, the prices have gone up almost 10 percent in the last nine months. That's tremendous gain."

Amazon concurs: The company announced in November that it will build an east coast operations hub there and create 5,000 jobs, for which the average salary will be over $150,000 a year.

Besides offering an affordable housing market, "there are more jobs in Nashville than any other small city in America," says Corcoran. A 2018 Workforce Report from LinkedIn found that, over the past two years, hiring rates in Nashville have risen significantly: 11.2 percent. And Nashville ranked as the No. 3 city for attracting talent.