First-time buyer numbers up by nearly 8% year on year

The number of people taking their first step on the property ladder increased by nearly 8% in April compared with a year earlier, according to a trade association.

Some 27,370 mortgages were handed out to first-time buyers, 7.9% more than in the same month in 2018, UK Finance said.

Meanwhile, 25,450 mortgages for existing home-owners moving house were completed in April 2019, a 6.4% increase on the same month a year earlier.

Buy-to-let mortgage lending for house purchase remained flat.

There were 5,100 new buy-to-let house purchase mortgages completed in April 2019, the same as this time last year.

Jeremy Leaf, a north London estate agent and a former residential chairman of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics), said the figures confirm that first-time buyers are increasingly taking advantage of improving affordability and reduced competition from buy-to-let landlords, who have faced tax and regulatory changes.

Mark Harris, chief executive of mortgage broker SPF Private Clients, said: “First-time buyers continue to take advantage of low mortgage rates at high loan-to-values, a slowdown in price growth – and falls in some areas – and government schemes such as Help to Buy.”