Education comes at a price, and not just the cost of the degree itself. We're talking about the inability to take advantage of today's low mortgage rates and stable prices.

Student loans are now cited most often by young buyers as the main expense that prevents them from saving for a down payment. Nothing new there, perhaps. But a new report from a well-recognized real estate consulting firm is the first to quantify the impact.

According to John Burns Real Estate Consulting, some 414,000 new home transactions will be lost this year because of student debt. At the average price of $200,000 per house, that translates to about $83 billion in lost business.

Burns analysts Rick Palacios Jr. and Ali Wolf say that in a typical year, about 8 percent of people aged 20-39 would normally buy a house. But many are weighed down by their student loans. Every $250 per month in student debt reduces young buyers' purchasing power by $44,000, the 30-page report maintains. And of the 16 million people in the first-time buyer cohort, 5.9 million -- 35 percent -- pay more than $250 a month on their school loans.

Indeed, 5.9 million heads-of-household under the age of 40 now pay more than $250 a month in student loans, the Burns company study found. Large monthly payments like this can easily push would-be borrowers over the 43 percent debt-to-income ratio cutoff set by most lenders.

Here's another way to look at the issue: Assuming a median first-time buyer income of $61,000 and a maximum mortgage for the typical first-timer, you'd be able to qualify for a loan of up to $234,000 as long as you carried no extra debt.

But if you have student loans and pay $250 on them per month, your maximum mortgage would be cut to $190,500. If your monthly school debt payment was $500, you'd be able to borrow only $147,000.

Since 2005, the amount of student loan debt has swelled, now exceeding $1.1 trillion, the report points out. That's up from $241 bllion in 2013. And the average balance has nearly doubled during that period, from $10,650 to $21,000.

Historically, better-educated, higher-earning consumers were more likely to become owners by the time they reached 30. But that trend reversed itself in 2012 and continues today. Now, it's 30-year-olds with no history of student debt who are more likely to become owners.

Some 45 percent of all 25-year-olds have some student debt. But that's not the only thing that's holding them back.

Another report, this one from the National Association of Home Builders, says 83 percent of builders polled in August lost sales over the previous six months because their buyers could not qualify for financing.

Of course, contracts can fall through for any number of reasons. But well over half of the builders said lending standards were tight -- too tight for many first-timers to make the grade.

"If 83 percent of the builders lost 9.7 percent of their sales," said NAHB economist Paul Emrath, "that works out to an estimated 18,700 new home sales lost because buyers were unable to qualify."

Said NAHB Chairman Kevin Kelly, a builder from Wilmington, Delaware: "NAHB advocates for prudent lending standards, but we've seen banks and regulators swing the pendulum too far and create an environment where lending standards are too restrictive."

Getting back to higher education. While we understand the value of a degree, the question, at least to the Citizens Financial Group of Providence, Rhode Island, is: Is it worth the price?

Certainly, college grads earn more than those who only completed high school -- perhaps twice as much over their working years. But a study by Citizens Financial found that many grads don't believe going to college was worth the cost.

Indeed, more than three quarters wish they had planned better in paying down their student loans. And while nearly two-thirds of the former students agreed that "going to college enabled me to do great things in my life," a whopping 47 percent said they may not have chosen college at all had they known the impact college debt would have on their lives.

"Despite the well-documented, long-term value of a college degree," commented Citizens' Brendan Coughlin, "too many Americans continue to struggle with paying the rapidly increasing cost after they have graduated."

Want to invest in a single-family house, but your local market stinks? And you've always been told to buy nearby so you can manage the property yourself?

You could invest in rentals in some far-off -- but really hot -- location, but who in the world wants to deal with the hassle of being a landlord? Especially in a place you can't get to at a moment's notice.

A relatively new online real estate investment platform called HomeUnion solves these problems. Based in Irvine, California, it provides all the services necessary for individuals to invest remotely in single-family rentals.

HomeUnion's "cradle-to-grave," turnkey service spans the life of the investment, from finding decent properties in respectable neighborhoods that will offer an acceptable return, to advising you on buying the place, finding tenants, managing the property and even selling when the time comes.

HomeUnion "offers two major value propositions," says its CEO, Don Ganguly.

First, it allows investors to put their money in the places that offer the best deals in terms of return on capital. Typical returns run 6 percent to 8 percent for cash investments, after expenses, and 8 to 17.5 for leveraged -- or mortgaged -- investments (again, after expenses).

And that's just cash flow. Appreciation, while possible, is not figured into those figures, according to Ganguly. That's "way better than you can get with other fixed-income investments," he points out.

The company analyzes dozens of factors to identify markets where investments make sense, including housing prices, rental rates, vacancies, trends, employment and population growth. It also relies on input from local experts with a more intimate knowledge of a particular market.

Once the proprietary analytics are completed, it "puts boots on the ground" in the best places to identify and vet individual properties, according to Ganguly. It is currently putting money to work in 15 locations, including Austin, Chicago, Dallas and Houston, and will soon announce its entry into five more places. The goal is 25 markets by year's end.

Typically, the company looks for properties in the $80,000-$100,000 range in nice neighborhoods. It particularly disdains expensive communities where rents don't pencil out. The goal is to find houses in places where the monthly rent is about 1 percent of the cost of the house -- for instance, a $100,000 house that generates $1,000 in rent.

Next, HomeUnion puts together a management team to operate the house on the investor's behalf. The team makes sure the house is in showing condition, finds and vets tenant candidates, takes care of leases, collects the rent and is on-call during occupancy should a problem occur.

In other words, all the things you'd have to do to manage the property, but can't do from afar.

Management fees run between 7 percent and 10 percent of the monthly rent, or about what you'd pay if you dealt directly with managers.

On top of that, HomeUnion charges a 1 percent asset-management fee that covers, among other things, handling the logistics of money transfers, contract negotiations with vendors and managing expenses.

Ganguly stresses that his young company is not a listing site. Rather, it is a platform to help investors identify and purchase single-family homes to rent. It is "hands-free investing for individuals to invest remotely," he says.

Another thing HomeUnion is not is a flipping service, in which you buy and sell within six months. On the contrary, says Ganguly, "we're looking for folks who are looking for stable incomes for at least three to five years."

Of course, if you buy a place using HomeUnion's platform, you can hold it as long as you like or sell whenever you desire. That's completely up to each individual investor.

Realize, though, that while investing in single-family rental houses is more stable than the stock market, rentals are not exactly liquid assets.

There's also no guarantee on your returns. "We're buying a lot of data" in searching for strong markets, says the CEO, "but nothing is without risk."

Currently, the company has maybe a thousand clients who run the gamut from retired individuals to young folks who see rentals as a good way to generate income. But Ganguly says that if the platform attracts the interest of just 100,000 of the 8-10 million people who earn enough to dabble in the rental market, "we'll be in pretty good shape."

"For the past two years, we have been plotting our real estate investment management program in a limited number of markets, and fine-tuning our models and asset-management practices so investors can find and buy properties based upon their own preferences, without having to become hands-on landlords," says Ganguly.

"We can now offer individual investors the efficiency and simplicity enjoyed by institutional investors."

If you think the game's over when you accept a signed contract from a buyer, think again.

Realty transactions don't end until you get to the closing table and all the papers are signed, sealed and delivered. In the 30 to 60 days between contract and settlement, anything can go haywire, and it often does. Sometimes the contract never closes.

There are no specific, recent statistics on the percentage of contracts that don't close. The National Association of Realtors stopped asking its members questions to determine how many agents had dealt with failed transactions. But in a 2012 NAR member survey, one in three members said they had a deal that fell through.

"Bottom line is, we have too many transactions not making it to the closing table," said Lynn Madison of Lynn Madison Seminars, a training and development company based in Schaumburg, Illinois.

There's a litany of reasons deals fall through. The buyers can't secure financing; the inspection uncovers some hidden defect the buyer just cannot accept; maybe the buyer simply gets scared and changes their mind.

Usually, though, contracts fall apart because someone along the real estate food chain fails to do his or her job correctly -- or completely, said Adorna Carroll of Dynamic Directions, a real estate training firm in Berlin, Connecticut.

Carroll said that having a license does not guarantee the intelligence of your agent, the other guy's agent or any of the other professionals you deal with. Some are as "dumb as a bag of hammers," Carroll said at a NAR convention a couple of years back. "They don't know what they don't know."

Sometimes, the educator said, they let things fall through the cracks, they let their egos get in the way of good judgment, they don't play well with others or they simply expect someone else do their work for them.

This is not to besmirch the good name of hardworking realty professionals, just to warn buyers and sellers alike to stay on their toes. Follow up with the various professionals to be sure they do their jobs and do them on time -- lest the contract lapse.

Take the listing agent. Has the agent explained the process to you, completely and to your full understanding? There are lots of events that have to fall into place once you accept the contract.

Did the agent take the time to explain the differences between an appraisal and an inspection? The differences are huge. Did he or she attach a list of non-realty, personal property items that come with the house? If so, that was an error: Lenders don't want it and will ask that it be removed, which could delay the deal.

Ditto a copy of the inspection report: unnecessary.

It is your job as the buyer or seller to go over every word in the listing and contract to make sure the address is correct, the square footage is accurate and the condition of the property is not misrepresented. And you must make sure that your agent has his or her eyes on all the moving parts.

"Our job is not done when we get a contract," Madison reminded her audience at the NAR meeting. "As a matter of fact, it has only just begun."

"Every team needs a quarterback, and you're it," she said. "We have the ball and it's our job to get it in the end zone."

It's also smart to check the buyer's agent's work to make sure the agreed-upon price is written clearly. The same goes for all riders or anything that has to be written by hand on a preprinted document.

The contract is a legal document, and agents, as skilled as they might be, are not attorneys. The last thing you want is to have a disagreement later over what the buyer meant by this language or that phrase.

Sometimes, according to Carroll, buyer's agents don't have a good team of professionals working with them: personnel who chase down missing legal papers, for example, or keep the client abreast of what's going on with the sale. That means your agent will have to do double duty, or again, the deal could fail.

Remember, there are various moving parts in every transaction: the home inspection, the appraisal, the bank, the lender's underwriter, the title company and the settlement agent. Any one of them can forget, or lose, an important document. Even your lawyer can drop the ball.

Bottom line: Your agent has to know how to do his or her job, as well as the jobs of everyone else who is a part of your transaction.