The Generation Rent activist group has produced a series of claims about the house buying process for single people.
It says being single adds 49 years to the time needed to save a deposit to buy a home in London compared with being in a couple.
The activists cite a very precise scenario to apparently demonstrate their claim. So it would apply to a couple with each earning the average salary in London and saving 20% of income after taxes and rent on what the group calls “an average one bed home.”
The group claims the couple would have enough for a deposit of £66,401 on the average first-time buyer home after just 6.6 years.
Then the group suggests that because a single average earner can borrow only half the mortgage that a couple could, the deposit needed rises to £275,000 on a £484,000 home.
The highly selective scenario assumes the average renter would save 20% of their income “left over after tax, student loan repayments and rent.”
The deposit needed “is either the difference between the house price and 4.5 times the gross salary (maximum mortgage typically offered), or 10% of the price if the maximum mortgage is higher than the house price.”
And Generation Rent goes on to claim that in England as a whole, the average time for a single person to save the deposit is 21 years and this varies dramatically from 3.3 years in the North East to what it alleges is “an impossible 56 years in London.”
However, after all this the group says: “In England the average time for a single earner to save, has fallen from 22.0 years in 2024 and 31.3 years in 2022 – but it is up from 16.4 years in 2014, with house prices having risen by about 50% in that time.
“While rents have risen by 25% since 2022, faster than net income at 19%, house prices have been fairly flat, allowing incomes to start catching up.”
This article is taken from Landlord Today