UK First-time buyers’ chances evaporate

Only 11.5% can afford a property in their own area without relying on their family, research shows, and stamp duty change will make it harder

Barely one in ten potential first-time buyers could afford to get on the property ladder without relying on their family for financial help. Only 11.5 per cent of all those trying to buy their first home can do so in their local area under their own means, according to Skipton Group, the owner of Connells Group, the estate agency.

Having analysed an area’s average incomes and house prices, it found that Ceredigion in west Wales was the least affordable part of the UK for locals to buy their first home.

Fewer than 3 per cent of local people wanting to stay in Ceredigion could afford to buy a typical first home in the county, Skipton calculated. The four least affordable places for first-time buyers were all in Wales, a reflection more of “very low” average incomes than house prices.

In the City of London, 3.2 per cent of first-time buyers could afford to buy without tapping the Bank of Mum and Dad, with much higher house prices somewhat offset by higher incomes. All but one of the most affordable areas were in Scotland. In Aberdeen, close to 33 per cent of locals could buy a home independently.

In Manchester, the only place in England in the top ten, the proportion was about 23 per cent. With house prices having risen much faster than wages over the past decade, younger people trying to buy their first home increasingly rely on help from their families.

Legal & General estimates parents gave £9.2 billion last year to help their children get on the ladder. Stuart Haire, chief executive of Skipton Group, owner of Skipton Building Society, said the “chronic lack of affordability is about to get even worse”, in reference to looming changes to stamp duty.

From April the threshold at which first-time buyers pay stamp duty will drop from £425,000 to the previous level of £300,000, adding up to £6,250 to the overall purchase cost.

The typical first-time buyer home will now be liable for stamp duty in 32 per cent of local authorities, up from 8 per cent at present, Skipton said.

“We know the public finances are tight, but we urge the government not to move the goalposts and exacerbate the pain already being felt by first-time buyers,” Haire said.

“We are calling on the government to maintain the nil rate stamp duty threshold of £425,000 for people buying their first home and to uprate this threshold in line with inflation each year.”

Source: The Times

The singular rise of solo living in UK

More than one in eight of us now live alone, and it is changing the kind of houses developers are building.

More than one in eight of us now live alone, with the surge in solitary homeowners and renters outstripping the general rise in the UK population. There are 8.4 million people living alone, that is 13 per cent of all households.

This has gone up by 620,000 in ten years, an increase of about 8 per cent. The population of the UK has gone up by 6 per cent in that time, according to the Office for National Statistics. It is forecast that by 2039 there will be 10.7 million people living alone in the UK.

But it’s not affluent young professionals leading this demographic charge — it’s older people. Those aged 65 and over account for 93 per cent of the growth in single-person households in the past decade. And more than twice as many men — an increase of 415,000 compared with 204,000 women — went solo between 2013 and 2023.

The number of people aged between 25 and 44 living alone fell from 18.8 per cent in 2013 to 17.5 per cent in 2023. Several affluent London postcodes are singleton territory, with more than half the occupants of the City (51 per cent) going it alone, followed by Kensington and Chelsea (43.7 per cent) and Westminster (42.7 per cent).

The national average is 30 per cent. But there are interesting outliers, according to the property consultancy JLL. These include Norwich, where 38.9 per cent of households are single, and the Lancashire seaside resort of Blackpool (38 per cent).

In a report last year, local services in Blackpool identified “an oversupply of poor-quality one-person accommodation and limited choice of family housing”. In Norwich, where a high proportion (15 per cent) of over-65s live alone, many students from the city’s two universities stay on after graduating, according to Mason Burrell from the local estate agency Brown & Co. “Norwich is well suited [to single living] in that it has a large number of terraced houses, starter homes and one-bedroom apartments.”

The estate agency Hamptons analyzed claims for the single person council tax discount, which entitles occupiers to 25 per cent off their bill, and found that Blackpool and South Tyneside, where 42 per cent claim, followed by Norwich and the Kent coastal town of Hastings, with 40 per cent, were at the forefront.

“Areas where people are most likely to live alone tend to have more elderly populations,” says Aneisha Beveridge from Hamptons. “Whereas areas with fewer single occupants are some of the most unaffordable parts of the country and/or suburban hotspots, which tend to be dominated by families.”

10.7 Million: Projected number of single UK households by 2039

People living alone are less likely to own their home. This is largely down to affordability. In 2024 the average income for a mortgaged household was 66 per cent higher than that of a single person, down from 75 per cent in 2022 and from the 20-year high of 90 per cent in 2015, according to the estate agency Savills. A single person in full-time employment would need to borrow seven times their annual earnings to purchase the average property in the UK. This rises to more than nine times their salary in London and the southeast. “There is a clear, marked disparity in earnings, and hence borrowing power, between a mortgaged household and that of the average single person,” says Nick Maud, the director of research at Savills. “Our data presents a stark illustration of the significant challenges faced by single people in accessing debt and therefore the housing market, compared with households that include two or more working people. “Those priced out of the owner occupier market, either through circumstance or lifestyle choice, turn to the rental market, which places further strain on a sector which is already experiencing a constriction in supply.” Requirements for renting differ by age. “We find singles under 30 are generally more open to living in a flatshare and often team up with a friend to find a suitable property,” says Adam Jennings, the head of lettings at the estate agency Chestertons. “Singles aged 30 and over tend to have a more established career path and larger budget. The majority of this age group favors living alone and are in a financial position to do so. “Younger tenants don’t always plan to live in their flat long-term, while singles aged 30 and over want to create more of a home and are looking to sign long-term tenancy agreements of two years and more.” Not enough new homes are being built to meet the increase in single households. Apartments make up 40 to 45 per cent of all new homes, according to the Home Builders Federation, a trade body. “But significant constraints remain,” according to its chief executive, Neil Jefferson. “Planning policy changes are welcome, but a lack of affordable mortgage lending is suppressing demand.” Although touted as an affordable answer for single buyers, shared ownership homes, whereby people buy a portion of the property and pay rent on the rest, represented less than 1 per cent of households in the 2020 English Housing Survey. Build to rent (BTR), when properties are purpose-built for the rental market, is becoming a popular option, with more than 265,000 either finished, in the pipeline or planning. “According to our joint research with Savills, BTR is in the new-homes pipeline for 67 per cent of local authorities,” says Ian Fletcher, the director of policy at the British Property Federation, a trade organization. “These homes cater to people living solo, providing well-maintained properties and security of tenure. But they are primarily located in towns and commuter hubs, meaning there will be areas of the country where options for people to live alone will be constrained.” Fletcher highlights both BTR and co-living projects, such as the developments by the London firm Pocket Living, where 88 per cent of buyers are single and paying at least 20 per cent below market value — £232,000 to £300,000 for one-bedroom apartments — as important building blocks in addressing the needs of singletons. “Another consideration is the effect on mental health and loneliness,” Fletcher says. “We hear a lot that the communities in co-living and BTR are an important part of why people choose to live there. You get the best of both worlds, a place of your own and communal spaces.”

UK homebuyers going ‘bonkers for bathrooms’

Where once a privy out the back sufficed, now the children need their own loos too

“I don’t know about you, but we probably had one bathroom between five or six of us when I was growing up,” says Robin Chatwin, an estate agent. “It’s certainly very different now.”

These days, at least in the comfortable corner of south-west London where Chatwin heads the residential properties sector for the agent Savills, buyers seeking a family home look for an en suite bathroom for the principal bedroom “at the very least”, he says, and ideally for their children’s bedrooms, too.

“I’ve worked in my office for 35 years now and there’s been a massive change. Before it was just all about bedrooms, and if there was one or two bathrooms, everyone was very happy. But everyone’s view has changed.

“Frankly, the more the merrier is what people would say. If they could have an en suite for every bedroom, they’d be very happy.”

In the 1960s a quarter of houses still lacked indoor WCs or bathrooms. 

Mark Breffit, a senior adviser for top-end sales at the agent Hamptons private office, agrees. “Everyone seems to be bonkers for bathrooms – and this trend is no way confined to prime central London.” Even in Victorian and Edwardian terraces, he says, “the desire for a first-floor suite with a walk-in wardrobe and en suite is increasingly prevalent”.

A cloakroom here, an en suite there – it is a situation the Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud considers ridiculous. In an interview with Radio Times, McCloud is especially irritated by “houses with more toilets than physical occupants. Why do people judge the status of a house by how many toilets you can offer your guests? It’s absurd.”

Most people, of course, do not have unlimited space or funds to put an extra loo on every floor – and in plenty of properties, particularly houses in multiple occupation, where as many as five renters may share a bathroom, the lengthy queue outside the bathroom door is still a daily ritual.

But among homeowners, British toilet inflation is not confined to the buyers with the biggest budgets, according to Chatwin, who says those looking for two-bed flats now frequently ask for a second bathroom to help rent the spare room.

Recent research by Savills found that across the market, British buyers are prepared to pay a significant premium for extra bathrooms, with asking prices per square foot 20% higher for homes with two bathrooms compared with those with just one. Strikingly, an extra bathroom in a one-bedroom flat adds significantly more value per square foot than an extra reception room, the estate agent says.

What is going on? The location and quantity of one’s toilet facilities may be an architectural problem, but it has always been a marker of social status, says Melanie Backe-Hansen, a historian and broadcaster specialising in the history of houses.

Before the mid-19th century, she notes, few houses in Britain had an indoor toilet, their occupants relying on privies, earth closets and buckets until a technological leap in plumbing revolutionised the business of doing one’s business. Toilets, at least for the aspirant middle class, moved indoors – although, notes Backe-Hansen, “in a lot of the larger houses in the country, they didn’t have indoor toilets for many years because they had servants to deal with it”.

Ideally, many people would have a bathroom on every floor.

For today’s elite, bathroom showiness is no less prevalent: a house bought by Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez during their recent brief marriage reportedly had 10 bedrooms and 17 bathrooms. The US habit of listing properties by their bedroom and bathroom numbers, seen in luxury property shows such as Netflix’s Selling Sunset, may also have influenced the growing trend in Britain, Chatwin believes.

But if status is clearly a factor in increasing bathroom numbers as household incomes have risen, comfort is, too. The most remarkable thing about our domestic toilet habits, says Backe-Hansen, is the speed at which they have changed. In 1967, a quarter of homes in England and Wales still lacked either a bath or shower, an indoor WC, or a sink with hot and cold water. By 1991 that figure was 1%.

“It wasn’t long ago that a lot of housing didn’t have internal bathrooms, or just had a loo out the back of the kitchen,” she says. “That expectation we now have of fixtures and fittings, and all the lovely shiny bathrooms that we have now – they were much less common only 50 … years ago. Things have drastically changed.”

Source: The Guardian