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When a friend breaks the news that they’ve managed to scrape together the elusive deposit for a first home within the confines of zone six, it’s pretty much a dead cert that they’ve had to borrow some money from the bank of mum and dad. And now another gloomy housing survey has revealed exactly how much Londoners are relying on their parents to get on the property ladder.
The survey by Legal & General shows that 40 percent of Londoners are relying on their parents to buy their first home.
The country-wide average borrowed from our parents is £21,600, but naturally, the figure is much higher for London’s competitive housing market at £29,400, according to The Guardian.
This means that parents are now among the ten largest mortgage lenders in the UK, dishing out a similar amount towards mortgages as Yorkshire Building Society. They will lend an estimated £6.5bn towards property this year – a whopping 30 percent more than last year.
It’s just the latest sign that our housing market is up shit creek. Or putting it more eloquently, Nigel Wilson of L&G commented: ‘Transaction volumes are down in the housing market, but [parental] funding is growing exponentially. This is not a good thing, nor is it sustainable or equitable for our parents [the lenders] or young people [the borrowers].’
In other news, London is the sixteenth best city for millennials to live in (apparently).
And Sadiq Khan is going to name and shame London’s worst landlords.