Tuesday, September 18, 2007
First-time buyers heading toward extinction
First time buyers market share shrinks to 9.7%
The NAEA have still got their heads in the sand, but what would you expect. They report that activity has increased since July, but also that " first time buyers took a smaller share of the market this summer as their percentage share was reported at 9.7%, compared with 13.4% in August 2006."
Posted by uncle chris @ 08:26 AM (837 views)
7 thoughts on “First-time buyers heading toward extinction”
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waitingfor hpc says:
what first time buyers????
dohousescrashinthewoods says:
Those are disguised amateur BTLs 😉
uncle tom says:
A lot of people get counted twice – or more – as FTB’s, and this has included speculators.
For ‘First time buyer’ read “person buying property with mortgage who has no mortgage to redeem at the same time, and will be using the property as their primary address”
As a consequence, divorcees often get counted a second time, and I’m certain some people entering the BTL market are not entirely straight with their lenders – I know of one tenant who gets (quote) “a surprising amount of correspondence addressed to the landlord”
converted lurker says:
I reckon the NAEA are spot on with their figures. This is not the cml counting returners etc., this is genuine ftb enquiries. This also (conveniently?) fits in with most other market figures from lenders who (when pressed) reckon ftbs make up 10% of the market
su says:
One of my friends was told by an estate agent that she could be classed as a first time buyer because she had sold her previous property more than 5 years ago.
dugmug says:
Obviously not every single FTB has been priced out by this boom. Many have of course, reducing the proportion significantly, but there were still a few – buying in relatively cheap areas, or with help from mum and dad, or doing shared ownership, or getting 125% mortgages with no money down from Northern Rock(!), etc, etc (including young Master Archibald Smythe, who left university 2 years ago to work in the City and is now moving out of Mater and Pater’s house on the back of his first £1m bonus – still a first time buyer!).
What these figures appear to tell us is that even some of these categories of FTBs can’t hack it anymore. This will be partly down to the interest rate rises affecting “affordability”, partly down to even higher house prices since same time last year, but maybe, just maybe, also because they can see the writing is on the wall and so they are holding off purchasing to see if the long awaited crash arrives? I’d like to think so – whatever the category of buyer, less buyers will equal lower prices.
Drewster says:
Two of my friends are recent FTBs. They’re buying in a relatively cheap part of the country, the Manchester suburbs, where there are no overpriced city-centre flats and fewer BTLs pushing up prices. The properties are bog-standard red-brick terraces. One is buying with parental support, the other is buying with his girlfriend. They all work in the public sector so they assume their jobs are secure. They’re at a stage in their lives (mid-20s) where buying a house is the next logical step and believe that “rent is dead money”. One is using an interest-only mortgage and is overstretching himself (6.5x salary); the other is being more sensible and buying at 4x combined salaries. They aren’t particularly financially literate but they are sensible enough to have paid off any unsecured debt first. Both see buying a house as a long-term plan for a place to live; they aren’t buying as an investment.
So just because there may be fewer FTBs doesn’t mean they have gone away entirely!