Survey: Young first-time home buyers need parents’ help

Young homebuyers in the UK are finding that many of them need their parents financial help in order to get into their first home. The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) has released new figures showing that 39 percent of home owners under 30 have had help from their parents, while of those buying since 2004, over 40 percent have needed help. More than 75 percent of first-time buyers under the age of 25 told pollsters that they could not have purchased their first home without help. The survey by CML also revealed that, of those under-30s who have not yet bought their first home, 57 percent expect to do so within the next five years. One third of those expect that they will get financial help from their parents when they do buy.

The new survey also helped explain something that had puzzled the CML last year, when it was shown that while 80 percent of those surveyed believed that it had never been tougher for first-time home buyers to get a home, only 8 percent of them thought that parents should help more than they already were. CML’s head of research , Bob Pannell, said that the new research shows that this is so because over the past few years parents have already been helping their children into the market and the young buyers are not sure that their parents can do more.

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