That stamp duty changes will do little to help most first time buyers?

[Creambun2]

The housing market in the uk is totally dysfunctional. This is bad for the country on many levels. Many people are not having families due to housing situation.

Not enough suitable houses being built. No houses being built for social renting.

When many people cannot even thing about buying when price to earnings ratio is crazy.

I hope all the idiots who cream themselves about high house prices realise that eventually there will be a large market correction.

And certain boomers who shit on about "I worked hard and didn't have an iphone and avacado toast" and the reason that young people can't afford housing can fuck right off. Please don't expect any sympathy from young people of all your assets are taken for your elderly care needs.

newts it's not just random shit you know. The obr have stated this will probably help only a few thousand people and will increase prices by 0.3%. You are not one of these people who hate "experts" are you? hmm

Not at all. I'm a solicitor. I thought you were too from the solicitor thread?? I'm having my doubts now.

What's to stop a buy to let invester taking advantage of the scheme & putting the house purchase in a relatives name?

It's the fault of those pesky feminists. When families only had one wage-earner then you could buy a house with one wage, now there are two incomes prices have risen accordingly. Let's go back to the 1950s.

Yes, because that's clearly what I meant, people on here are so ridiculous. Is it not shocking that 2 earners can now no longer afford what 1 could?

Doesnt help anyone above the south really. Not many first time buyers would be buying above £250k further up the country.

I know some of the best housing researchers in the country. Most of them laugh at the idea this will do anything to alleviate the housing crisis. As one of them said to me this morning "It's just another tax bonus for the wealthy, when we should be helping those less well off".

I think it's good, we bought our first house a couple of years ago, took a while to save up enough for deposit, fees and stamp duty. It wasn't getting a big enough mortgage that was the issue.

If we hadn't have had to pay stamp duty (which was around £4000), we could have bought a year earlier and paid slightly less for the house. This will benefit loads of people in that same position!

House prices are probably strongly linked to how much people can borrow

Yup but the amount you can borrow doesn't just depend on income, it also depends on the rate of interest. Blame Blair & Browwn - they started this long period of very low interest rates that caused the bubble.

I don't think the housing market in the UK is dysfunctional.

The housing market in the London and parts of the South is frothy. But it is functioning, albeit not for lower paid workers or people without the ability to raise a huge deposit from savings or family help.

My friends and family in Liverpool, Cardiff, Belfast, Manchester were all able to buy in their 20s without much hassle or parental help, while being paid average salaries for the area

What's to stop a buy to let invester taking advantage of the scheme & putting the house purchase in a relatives name

To qualify as a FTB, I would assume that the FTB would have to be named on the deeds and the mortgage and qualify for it in their own right. If the investor was named on the mortgage and had previously purchased property themselves, they wouldn't qualify.

I suppose if 'someone' was to give the FTB the deposit or whole amount you could take advantage, but that would only generally be close relatives that did that.

In most cases the amount of money saved wouldn't actually be enough to go to great lengths to diddle the system anyway. It's one of those policies that sounds good in theory, but when you start examining it, doesn't actually give (or cost) that much.

To qualify as a FTB, I would assume that the FTB would have to be named on the deeds and the mortgage and qualify for it in their own right. If the investor was named on the mortgage and had previously purchased property themselves, they wouldn't qualify.

This is true. I am a FTB but DH is not so we don't qualify.

We're 2 earners, totaling 50k. We have been in a HA 2 bed semi for 5 years, it was a new build when we moved in, low quality and not enough room for a dining table, so you can imagine the size of everything else, it's a squeeze. We're both desperately holding on to gym equipment and hobby stuff we have crammed into our room (not enough space to use) it's just depressing.

Earlier this year the property was 'released' so we could then inquire about buying it. The price totally floored us, we can get a non new build in the same area which would have 3/4 bedrooms... walls thicker than the 2 pencil width we have right now, and some character.

I have been paying rent since I was kicked out at 17. This has so far amounted to just under 100K.

We'd love a mortgage just for the idea of not having to worry about rent when we eventually retire. It's no way feasible.

The stamp duty thing will just be a security blanket for when people move, or will cover flooring/decorating. What can't the government change the way mortgages are given? 100%? Rental history? Why should I have to pay for people's 2nd homes, when in the long term I will probably have to claim benefits when I retire?

My friends and family in Liverpool, Cardiff, Belfast, Manchester were all able to buy in their 20s without much hassle or parental help, while being paid average salaries for the area.

I can report similar.

Yup but the amount you can borrow doesn't just depend on income, it also depends on the rate of interest. Blame Blair & Browwn - they started this long period of very low interest rates that caused the bubble

What bubble? Outside London and the south east, prices are the same or less than they were before low interest rates started. And as sparechange says, in northern cities, people in their 20s can often buy relatively easily, even on average wages. Two people on £20k can borrow £100-150k, which is plenty to buy a 2/3 bedroom house in many areas, as long as they can save a deposit of around £10-20k, which they often can.

Therefore, there has to be a strong influence of something else other than interest rates in the regions where prices have increased significantly in the last 10 years. Perhaps we need to move away from trying to cram most of the jobs, investment and opportunties into one tiny overcrowded corner of the country?

My friends and family in Liverpool, Cardiff, Belfast, Manchester were all able to buy in their 20s without much hassle or parental help, while being paid average salaries for the area.

I know people in those areas that would struggle to now.

The divide between north and south is the biggest issue. We've ended up with pockets of the country where nobody wants to live - see the houses that were sold for £1 in stoke for example - or swathes of former mining areas where the government simply didn't bother to replace the mining with any other form of industry.

Pumping money and incentives for employees to open in northern cities and to match London wages - that would get people moving around the country and would spread things out a bit more fairly as well as regenerating some areas. Otherwise you end up with an ever increasing divide and whole areas of green in the south east being carpeted over with housing estates that are still unaffordable whilst other places don't see any improvement.

• I don't mean "don't want to live" in a derogatory sense - I mean there are few opportunities there due to lack of investment, so people move out

What bubble? Outside London and the south east, prices are the same or less than they were before low interest rates started.

Data from Land Registry. Average house price Jun 1997 £61,946; now £226,327. There's no way that all that growth is in the SE.

Pumping money and incentives for employees to open in northern cities and to match London wages - that would get people moving around the country and would spread things out a bit more fairly as well as regenerating some areas. Otherwise you end up with an ever increasing divide and whole areas of green in the south east being carpeted over with housing estates that are still unaffordable whilst other places don't see any improvement.

Absolutely. I would ban London-weighting.

Purits - Yes! Although I wouldn't ban it because it would make the employees suffer - it could well be the difference between affordable rent and unaffordable rent. I would instead make employers pay it across the country to make working in other places more appealing. Of course we can't change the fact that finance and its huge rewards will always need to be in the city - but most professions aren't finance!

Or even give the employer incentives to give travel allowances so people can live further out and still get to work without being savaged for thousands of pounds a year in travel costs.

I hope all the idiots who cream themselves about high house prices realise that eventually there will be a large market correction

People have been predicting that for years though, and as long as demand outweights supply, it won't happen. So IMO it won't happen.

And I am no baby-boomer but it is true that our parents/grandparents generations were prepared to live in relative poverty to be able to buy their homes - expectations change, and I wouldn't have wanted to go without a car/telephone/tv/wine to pay the mortgage. Doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Surely these first time buyers aren't going to have anywhere to buy other than brand new properties. Most people I know need to move up to a larger property but can't afford them move, and are staying put in the first time buyer properties they already own. For us to move up to the larger property we need the stamp duty alone would be 17k so we will be staying here and extending. So therefore not freeing up a property for those further down the ladder

Or incentivise employers to base themselves in cities outside London.

They would benefit from possibly lower wage bills (eg its probably a lot easier to recruit someone in a similar job for £40k in Leeds or Manchester than London on £50k) and lower office costs.

I'm not sure as many of these jobs as is claimed 'have' to be in London. Are they all round everyone's offices every week?

We need to rebalance the economy, and that means a mixture of policy to drive investment in northern cities, and infrastructure. It's mad that so much more money is spent per head on infrastructure in London, while trains between the major cities of the north creep along at 40mph, with terribly outdated tracks and rolling stock. A high speed rail line that linked east to west: Hull, Sheffield, Huddersfield, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds, with a spur out to Birmingham/Coventry would really encourage the north to become more of a homogeneous and successful economic block.

It's the fault of those pesky feminists. When families only had one wage-earner then you could buy a house with one wage, now there are two incomes prices have risen accordingly. Let's go back to the 1950s.

Nope, it's the fault of the men who didn't seize the opportunity to drop paid hours and take up their fair share of homemaking. We could all have been working part-time now...

Indeed whisky. If they can build a tunnel from east London to Reading, they can do one from Hull to Liverpool without moaning that there are a few hills in the way.