House Prices Rising by £24 Every Day for First Time Buyers

While celebrities can often be seen splashing millions of pounds on their first homes, with a whopping £4 million spent by Molly-Mae Hague on her Cheshire pad, the average First Time Buyer (FTB) is spending £223,751 on their first property reveals new analysis from Direct Line Home Insurance.

The average FTB needs to find £43,623 more than they did in 2016, a 24 per cent increase, to secure their first property. Over the same period, the average salary of a thirtysomething, the decade that most people buy their first property, has risen by just 10 per cent, leaving them with a huge deficit. A typical FTB property is now worth roughly seven times a 30–39-year old’s annual salary, a rise from 2016 when it was six times, making the first rung on the property ladder increasingly hard to reach.

Direct Line’s analysis suggests that FTB prices are being impacted by the movements of those in their 30s across the country. The average FTB property price, in the ten local authorities that saw the greatest increase in residents aged 30-39 between 2016 and 2021, rose by 24 per cent.  In the 10 authorities with the greatest decrease in number of 30–39-year-old residents, there was a two per cent decrease in FTB prices.

Areas with an above-average increase in residents of those in their 30s, saw FTB prices rise by 22 per cent over the past five years, compared to just 10 per cent in areas with a below-average increase of residents in this age group.

Looking more deeply into local FTB hotspots, the areas with the fastest growing prices in Britain are Burnley in Lancashire (up 45 per cent over the past five years), the Orkney Islands on the north coast of Scotland (44 per cent), Rossendale, Lancashire (42 per cent), Bury (40 per cent) and Rutland, East Midlands (40 per cent). These five councils averaged a house value of £119,735 in 2016 and this rose by £50,158 to £169,893 in 2021, an increase of 42 per cent. These five areas also saw a nine per cent increase in residents aged 30–39-year-old over the same timeframe, compared to a national average increase of just five per cent.