First time buyers are struggling. It is no secret. The housing market is unforgiving and it is increasingly difficult for people to muster the funds to break through the deposit obstacle.
Figures released by the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) for May have revealed that year on year there were falls in the numbers of loans borrowed.
One good point highlighted by the data is that because of the competition between mortgage lenders, interest payments for first time buyers are low.
However, this doesn’t mean overall things are better. The number of loans being taken up was supposedly down 2.4 per cent from the same time last year, indicating that people aren’t able to get them, despite the low interest rates.
There are ways around it, schemes, most notably the Help to Buy Equity Loan and the Mortgage Guarantee, can help individuals to overcome the deposit and access these low mortgage rates. But these only deal with the individual and not with the market as a whole.
Should the schemes be widely used enough, it is possible they could impact the market. However, with the 100,000 user threshold for Help to Buy not long having been reached in total, and an estimated 200,000 homes needed to be built per year, it shows that the numbers have hardly dented the market.
In order for house prices to come down, supply and demand needs to be balanced, and for this to happen, a large, wide reaching approach needs to be instigated, and only then will homes be available for everyone at manageable prices.
