As a first time buyer, it can be difficult to know where you can actually afford to buy, especially given all the talk in the press on affordability and mortgage approval stats. The housing market is currently more varied than ever before, with new builds popping up everywhere you look, with geography playing a huge role in the cost of putting a roof over your head. Here at Search Mortgage Solutions, one of the UK’s leading mortgage brokers, we want to help make the process of starting your search for your dream first home as easy as possible.
As such, we have researched how much of the UK property market is available to you dependent on your current occupation. We took the average salaries from 7 different industries and applied the average first time buyer mortgage repayment figures to them (18%). This, coupled together with the average deposit of a first time buyer (£29,000) and a mid-range priced 3 bedroom property on the UK market allowed us to reach some surprising conclusions as to ‘affordability’ by job role. The results can be seen below.
| INDUSTRY | AVERAGE SALARY | MARKET AVAILABLE |
|---|---|---|
| Information Technology Services | £35,437 | 31% |
| Financial Services | £35,320 | 28% |
| Software Development | £34,508 | 27% |
| Construction | £30,808 | 18% |
| Manufacturing | £30,131 | 17% |
| Retail | £25,750 | 9% |
| Education | £24,950 | 9% |
What our study shows is that unless you are earning significantly above even the highest salary listed in our table (£35,437), then the percentage of properties available to you sits at less than a third of the entire UK market. A surprising discovery.
Following these results, we also looked at where the cheapest regions to buy in each part of the UK are, again looking at a mid-range priced 3 bedroom house with an average deposit of £29,000. The results are listed below.
| WHERE | MORTGAGE REPAYMENT PER MONTH |
|---|---|
| Strabane, Northern Ireland | £208 |
| Blaenau Gwent, Wales | £235 |
| Hartlepool, England | £298 |
| North Lanarkshire, Scotland | £319 |
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the North proved to be the most consistently cheap/available area of England, with County Durham, Yorkshire and Lancashire providing the majority of cheapest options. The most Southerly region in our price range was Corby in Northamptonshire. In Scotland, results were scattered, but the central regions surrounding North Lanarkshire generally proved to be the cheapest.
In Wales, the South Coast offered up all of its affordable regions in our price range, while in Northern Ireland almost every region was available in our highest salary job, but prices did range from £208 up to the £500’s.
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Statistics for average salaries was sourced from:
http://career-advice.monster.co.uk/salary-benefits/pay-salary-advice/uk-average-salary-graphs/article.aspx
Each search was carried out using this tool:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23234033
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