The latest figures show that since the launch of Help to Buy 14 months ago, 22,831 people have bought newly built homes through the Help to Buy equity loan scheme. There have also been 7,313 sales through the Help to Buy mortgage guarantee and 5,173 sales through the Help to Buy: NewBuy scheme.
This takes total sales through Help to Buy to over 35,000. All sales through Help to Buy: equity loan and three quarters of overall sales through all elements of Help to Buy are new build properties.
Housing minister Kris Hopkins said that since the launch of the scheme, house building is up a third compared to last year and at its highest level since 2007, while 216,000 planning permissions were granted in the last 12 months.
Nationally, 86% of Help to Buy equity loan sales were to first time buyers, while the average house price under the scheme was £206,084, far lower than the £252,000 average house price. The vast majority of Help to Buy equity loan sales, some 94%, are outside London.
Overall, the highest numbers of Help to Buy sales are in Leeds with 580 followed by Wiltshire with 506, Central Bedfordshire at 458, Milton Keynes 417 and Peterborough 379.
‘In 2010 we inherited a broken housing market, where hard working people who could afford a mortgage were locked out of home ownership because they couldn’t get the deposit together,’ said Hopkins.
‘Help to Buy is changing that. To date, this scheme has enabled 35,000 people buy their own place with a fraction of the deposit they would normally require. And with house building up a third over the past year, it’s clearly having a wider impact, getting workers back on construction sites and building the homes communities want and need,’ he added.
The Help to Buy equity loan scheme enables people to buy a newly built home with a deposit of at least 5% of the property price, while the government offers a loan of up to 20%. The rest is covered by a mortgage. This portion of the scheme has been extended up to March 2020 with a further £6 billion, meaning the scheme will support the construction of up to 200,000 new homes.
The mortgage guarantee offers mortgage lenders the option to purchase a guarantee on mortgages where a borrower has a deposit of between 5 and 20%. Because of this support, participating lenders are able to offer more mortgage products to borrowers with small deposits.
