When Jorge Mejia closed on his $445,000 town house in suburban Atlanta this month, he didn’t celebrate with Champagne or steak. Standing in his empty kitchen, he took a picture of a pepperoni pizza in its cardboard delivery box framed by his new house keys and a bare living room floor, and then proudly posted it to Reddit.
“The pizza symbolized years of hard work,” said Mejia, 28, who is a staff sergeant in the Marines and the first person in his immediate family to buy a home. He had seen similar pizza box pictures posted in a Reddit group, FirstTimeHomeBuyer, for more than a year, he said, and had been waiting to finally be able to upload his own.
Pizza — affordable yet celebratory, easily eaten by hand while sitting cross-legged on a carpet — has long been a move-in meal. But today, sharing an image online of an open pizza box on the floor is a rite of passage for some first-time homeowners.
Videos and photos like Mejia’s now appear across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. They are especially conspicuous on the FirstTimeHomeBuyer Reddit group, which is primarily used for discussing the minutiae of contracts, interest rates or inspections.
Pizza pictures have grown so common in the group that some of its members say they are looking forward to taking a pizza photo as shorthand for buying a home. A few curmudgeons, meanwhile, have started complaining that the photos distract from the real advice. This has led to inspired discussions about the tradition of getting takeout on your first night in a new home, and pizza in general.
“Over the last year, I don’t know if the Reddit has been influencing me,” Mejia said, “but pizza has become one of my favorite foods.”
Nancy Cervantes, of Oxnard, California, a coastal city about 60 miles west of Los Angeles, said that pizza was an ideal meal for this major life moment, when you’re broke, tired, and it’s just you and the echo of empty rooms.
Cervantes asked Eddie Rosales, her real estate agent, to post a TikTok video of herself, her husband and their two children eating pizza on a blanket on the floor of their three bed, three-bath home, after they moved in on Dec. 31, 2024.
Cervantes, 45, works at a technology manufacturing company and her husband works at a medical clinic. With help from Rosales, they improved their finances over nearly four years by paying down debt, building up credit and savings, and selling some of their possessions. Their work made it possible for them to lower their loan interest rate and save for a down payment on their home, which they purchased for $910,000.
Rosales, an agent at Solutions Realty, said that for most of his clients, taking possession of the keys is a huge, “wow, we are here, we got here,” moment. And celebrating it with pizza taps into a shared sense of nostalgia, he added, because pizza is how many commemorate special events as children.
Eating pizza on the floor of an empty house also represents a new beginning, Rosales said. Homeowners can begin to dream about what comes next, beginning with the blank walls behind them. “Now you start thinking about how you are going to decorate,” he said.
Rachel Yep and her husband, Jaren Herald, posted their own pizza video to Instagram to celebrate beating eight other offers on the light-filled, two-bedroom condo they bought this spring in Northern Virginia.
“If our life was a TV show,” read her caption, “it feels like the next season is about to begin.”
Yep, a nurse practitioner who is also a brand ambassador for the clothing brand Lululemon, remembered all of the scenes of first-night pizza she had seen in movies and on television. She wanted to do her own.
“I was like, we have to do the pizza moment — it’s got to happen,” said Yep, 29. “So we went to a local pizza place that had recently opened in Arlington, and we got takeout from there, and we sat on the floor. And then we realized we didn’t have napkins, or a trash can, or anything, but we didn’t really care, because we were just so excited.”
Arthur Bovino, 49, a pizza podcaster and pundit who once worked for The New York Times, said pizza also provides a sense of normalcy and community at a time when you’ve just disrupted both.
“Whether it’s with the friends who just helped you move, your partner or family, this is a food that everyone knows as a contract of comfort,” Bovino said.
Bovino, who has lived in an apartment in Manhattan’s East Village for 16 years, has yet to buy his first home, and has not yet had his own pizza moment.
Neither has Adam Kuban, 51, a veteran pizza blogger and home pizza-maker who bought a co-op in Forest Hills, a neighborhood in New York City’s Queens borough, in 2015.
After decades of eating pizza multiple times a week, his move-in celebration with his wife and daughter involved another New York City takeout icon. “We got sushi,” he said.
