What was your LTV for starter family home in London?

[JustAlice]

If you bought your 1st family home or a 2-3-bedroom flat in Greater London in or after 2019, what was your LTV?
On another thread I was told that it’s a 60% LTV or 40% deposit territory, but I hardly believe it works this way these days.

Buying our first place in London right now, so this is fresh from the mortgage broker rather than memory:: 40% deposits are absolutely not the norm for first-time buyers - that figure describes people moving with equity or serious family help. The honest picture for FTBs in 2026 is that 90% and even 95% LTV products exist and are being lent on; the catch is the rate steps. The big jumps in price sit at 60%, 75%, 80%, 85% and 90%, so the real question is not "what LTV do people buy at" but which band your deposit lands in, and whether one more year of saving moves you into a cheaper one. We are aiming at 85-90% ourselves (10-15% deposit), which our broker described as completely standard for London FTBs without family money. The people quoting 60% LTV on that other thread are not wrong that the best rates live there - they are wrong that anyone starting out can reach it. One practical thing:: get a proper agreement in principle before you fixate on the percentage, because what a lender will actually offer on your income matters more than the theoretical maximum, and flats can come with lower maximum LTVs than houses depending on the lender (new-build flats especially).

@HouseHuntingAmy I think it’s assumed that before buying starter family home, each of the spouses already owned smth pre-marriage and managed to build some equity.
Maybe that’s how it worked some years back.

@HouseHuntingAmy it feels that MNetters just come into some money all the time, so I’ve started this thread to see if 40% deposits are a norm around London

Looking at how property sales are falling in London I would say no, not a norm for most people.

FTBs bought our 3 bed semi in z3 with 10% deposit a couple of years back.

That is true for a lot of people, and I think it used to be the default path - flat first, build some equity, then the family house. What strikes me in London now is how many first-time buyers skip the first step entirely, not because they have more money but because moving twice is so punishing:: stamp duty twice over, solicitor and moving costs twice, and years of rent in between while you save again. So the starter family home ends up being bought at 85-90% LTV by people who never owned before, just after a much longer saving grind. On the "coming into money" point - I think Mumsnet skews that way and it can warp your sense of what is normal. The people I know buying family homes as first-time buyers are doing it at 10-15% deposits, not 40%, and the ones at 40% almost always have family help or a previous sale behind them. The equity ladder still exists but the first rung has quietly moved - its noticable in how old first-time buyers are now. The only friends of ours who managed it without any help saved for nearly a decade, which I think would have been unusual twenty years ago.

No that’s definitely not the norm.

We bought a house as FTB in 2019 and had a 10% deposit. Mortgage was roughly 4x joint salaries.

I think the "equity ladder" is going to run out of steam, it relies on cheap mortgage debt coming into the Pyramid at the bottom, and Labour are hell bent on taxing higher value properties, making them now unappealing to many buyers.

That's the catch with any ladder, it only works while each rung has someone behind it. Though if the top end does get less appealing I wonder if it cuts both ways for first time buyers - chains might slow down, but there could be a bit less competition for the family homes in the middle. From where I'm standing the bigger killer is rent eating the deposit while you try to get on the bottom rung at all.