I spent some time in Hartlepool recently, during the election campaign for Jill Mortimer, now the first Conservative MP for the town for fifty seven years.
Two things struck me about Hartlepool during my all too brief visit. It is a wonderful town with huge skies and some beautiful houses, and those houses are for sale for, by Brentwood and Ongar standards, surprisingly low prices.
There is no doubt being a first time buyer, or even wanting to move somewhere bigger as your family expands, is very difficult in the South, because property prices are so high.
The Government is doing what it can with all larger developments having to include affordable housing, while the Help to Buy Equity Loan scheme provides home buyers in England with a loan to help with their deposit. Since its launch, over 300,000 properties have been bought with the support of this scheme, which has provided over £17 billion to home buyers in loans. Over 250,000 of these loans across England were made to first-time buyers, accounting for 82 per cent.
However, I was very interested to hear from Wayhome, a company which is about to launch in Brentwood to allow aspiring homeowners take their first steps towards homeownership. Hugh Boyle, the COO of Wayhome, told me Wayhome believes that if you can afford to rent a property, you should be allowed to buy it. The company offers a product they call Gradual Homeownership which Hugh says is funded by UK institutional investors with none of the controversies around service charges, hidden fees/costs or challenges with selling the property.
The company buys existing properties available for sale on the open market, and is looking to start buying in Brentwood to offer homes to those needing a part rent/part buy scheme. I look forward to seeing how it develops and how many people choose to take up the offer.
Finally for this month, if you’re offered a vaccine, please take it. We’re on the way out of lockdown restrictions, but we all need to do all we can to stop another wave of coronavirus laying us low.
