Ben Woolman, Director of Woolbro Group, spoke with Express Newspapers regarding Rightmove’s house price index for June, which revealed the average cost of a home coming to market hit its sixth consecutive record of £369,968.
Ben said: “Given the widely-anticipated slowdown in the delivery of new homes over the coming years – mainly as a result of rising building costs and a shortage of construction workers – demand will continue to outstrip supply, meaning the chances of a significant market correction are slim to none”.
David Woolman, Director of Woolbro Group, shares his thoughts with the Evening Standard.
The Chancellor unveiled a new mortgage guarantee scheme to help homeowners get onto the property ladder. Although it will not be replacing the current initiatives in place, such as the Help-to-Buy scheme, it will be a welcome addition of support for the residential sector. Even more so in London, where average house prices are higher and much larger deposits are needed for first-time buyers. The new initiative will increase affordability across the whole market for many potential homebuyers.
Before the pandemic, first-time buyers had huge sway on the property market and accounted for more than half of the homes purchased with a mortgage. The pandemic has meant there have been fewer lower deposit options available for first-time buyers, with banks withdrawing their 5% deposit mortgage offers in early 2020.
With this new scheme, there will be additional support for all buyers and more favourable mortgage offers. In addition, it should in theory speed up and simplify the mortgage application process. Traditionally, with HTB, homebuyers need to seek approval from both mortgage lenders and the government to qualify. However, with the mortgage guarantee scheme, the government will provide lenders with incentives to bring back 95% mortgages, taking on more of the risk, and ultimately, simplifying the application process.
Here are a few things you can do to help make the process a bit easier.
1) Start gathering a deposit The very first step is to work out your financial situation. Buying a home (particularly for the first time) will most likely require a mortgage. How much you can borrow will depend on several factors, from your earnings and your overall credit score to the area in which you would like to live. Ideally, you will need 20% of the house price, but if you don’t have that don’t worry. The governments Shared Ownership and Help To Buy schemes are in place to support a lower down payment. To calculate your borrowing capacity, check out our HTB calculator here: https://woolbrogroup.com/homes/. We recommend finding a good mortgage broker to help guide you towards the best product on the current market.
2) Searching for your new home Find a decent estate agent and start looking on @rightmove to get a feel as to what is out there and what you can get for your money. Since the number of new homes listed can be overwhelming, it is a good idea to set up some filters on your search. Viewing properties is time consuming, so it is important that you tell the estate agents clearly what you want and don’t want, to avoid wasted viewings.
3) Make an offer! When you see a home you love and you can imagine living there, then the next logical step is to make an offer. We highly recommend being financially qualified (via the sales financial team) before making any offer, so you don’t get your hopes up about a property, to then find that it is slightly out of reach.
4) The legals Picking the right solicitor is actually one of the most important aspects to ensure the process runs as smoothly as possible. As part of the conveyance process, your solicitor will raise any queries once the draft contract has been received and request searches to provide you with more in depth information about your new home and check that everything is compliant. If your solicitor is not on the ball, this process can drag on for months and it can cause frustration for all parties involved. Once the searches and valuation have been performed, contracts can be exchanged and steps will be made to move towards completion. If you are using Help To Buy, it is also worth keeping them on your radar and double checking all the documents before submitting them, as one wrong detail on a form, can really slow the whole process down.
5) Completion and moving in Completion is the day you officially get your keys! All of the necessary transactions from all parties involved will have gone through and you will receive a message to say that the keys can now be released. This an exciting moment, and means you can now finally think about moving in and starting life in your new home! Now all you have to do is pack your boxes and it’s at this point we realise that we don’t need half of the things that we carry around with us, but that’s for another post!
