Keep the Help to Buy door open!

Property developers should continue to advertise and inform buyers about help to buy properties before the deadline closes, no matter how tight that may be.

If a first-time buyer still has the opportunity to buy a new home with financial assistance, that door should be held open right up until it becomes impossible for them to do so.

The alternative, in my opinion, is an unknown, high cost and dystopian future where there are very few, if any, alternative assistance schemes for first-time buyers at anywhere near the level of direct financial support provided by help to buy.

Couple that with some mortgage rates being literally twice as high as they were a few months ago, having a stab at beating the deadline is still worthwhile.

For first-time buyers that are not registered on the scheme already, or don’t have a mortgage offer already, it is highly likely that they have missed the boat for now.

It is imperative, for the sake of those buyers that miss out in October and the hundreds of thousands more looking to buy their first home in the near future, that the scheme is extended or replaced with something similar or better.

Without first-time buyers, the housing market will seize up as the large pool of potential homeowners isn’t there to inject liquidity into the bottom layer of the property pyramid.

Without that liquidity, sales transactions will decrease sharply, which impacts the construction industry, property developers, construction professional services, tradespeople, real estate agents and many more secondary and tertiary stakeholders in the primary real estate and related industries.

Furthermore, with mortgage rates likely to hover around the mark they are currently at or increase slightly over time, an enforced shift may take us from a nation of homeowners to a nation of home renters. 

Many young people and first-time buyers will have no choice, particularly key workers such as teachers, nurses, carers and the emergency services who simply will not be able to afford to buy a home in the areas that they live and work.

As we lurch towards 2023 with a 65% increase, decade on decade, of families living in temporary accommodation, currently at 96,060 families, which doesn’t include the estimated 8,000 to 10,000 rough sleepers in the UK, the answer to the housing crisis is clear.

We must build more new homes for ownership, more new homes for rent and more council-owned affordable, sustainable homes to reduce the number of homeless families and people on their own in temporary accommodation and sleeping rough across the UK.

To do this, we must have Government schemes that support and assist young people, first-time buyers, key workers, low-income families and the elderly to buy and rent warm, safe homes.

Without help to buy or something very similar, we are condemning the next generation to very few opportunities to buy their own home with the added unwanted bonus of sky-high costs just to rent their own home.

We are sleepwalking towards a ‘no help to buy' scheme whilst we change housing ministers as fast as most people change their underpants — and, as ever, the only ones that will suffer are the ones that need help the most.

If a first-time buyer still has the opportunity to buy a new home with financial assistance, that door should be held open right up until it becomes impossible for them to do so.