Property Ladder Missing First Rung: Low Housing Stock
WHAT with interest rate rises and inflated house prices, the lot of a first-time buyer is rarely a happy one. Now, to add to their problems, it seems that there aren’t a lot of properties out there anyway.
According to a report by Hometrack, one-bedroom dwellings, often a buyers’ first step on the property ladder, make up only 3 per cent (800,000 properties) of the housing stock in England and Wales. Houses with three or more bedrooms make up two-thirds of the current stock while last year, only 10 per cent of new build homes were one-bedroom.
Hometrack’s director of research, Richard Donnell, said, “The lack of smaller-sized homes, combined with strong demand from investors and first-time buyers, has led to a constant upward pressure on prices at the bottom end of the ladder. This in turn has led to the value of one and two-bed homes being compressed up towards the price of three-bed properties.”
The report also reveals that the price difference between an average three-bedroom property (£194,000) and a typical one-bedroom home (£141,000) has decreased significantly since the early 1990s, when the first rung of the ladder was far more accessible.
Posted: 11th, June 2007 | In: Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
