7% of first time buyers used Help to Buy 1

Help to Buy 1 accounted for around 7% of first-time buyer purchases up to May this year, research from the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) has found.

The CML compared recent Department of Communities and Local Government figures which found that almost 19,400 properties were bought with a Help to Buy equity loan.

The total value of equity loans amounted to £791m, and they were used to buy properties with a total value of £3.97bn.

Figures from the DCLG showed that the median price of a property bought with a Help to Buy equity loan was £184,995, supported by a median equity loan of £36,999.

First-time buyers accounted for 16,964 purchases under the scheme, or 87.5% of the total.

But CML data for all first-time buyers shows that the median value of the properties they bought was a little lower, at £165,000

The CML said: “A comparison of the DCLG figures with our data on first-time buyers shows that almost 30% of all first-time buyers purchased a home for less than £125,000, but fewer than 15% of those with an equity loan bought properties priced in this range.

“The data show that the equity loan scheme was most likely to be used by those buying homes priced at between £150,000 and £250,000.”

The CML research also found that both first-time buyers and those taking out a Help to Buy equity loan were most likely to have a household income of between £20,000 and £50,000.

Overall, however, those buying with an equity loan tended to have incomes that were a little higher than first-time buyers as a whole.