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The ministry’s statistics, published today (26th February), showed Help To Buy equity loans exceeded £10bn for the first time in the third quarter of 2018.
The release of figures highlights how these equity loans supported the purchase of £49.89bn worth of property, with first time buyers accounting for 81% of total home purchases.
The Help to Buy: Equity Loan scheme can be used to purchase a new build property up to the value of £600,000, with a maximum equity loan of £120,000 (20%).
In Greater London, the maximum equity loan is £240,000 (40%).
According to reports, since the launch of the Help to Buy: Equity Loan scheme, on 1st April 2013 to 30 September 2018, 195,219 properties were bought with an equity loan.
Since then, to 30th September 2018, a total number of 10,829 properties were purchased in London (in 33 boroughs), with first time buyers accounting for 95% (10,333) of these purchases.
Of these purchases, 72% were made with an equity loan of exactly 40% of the purchase price, figures that suggest that most Londoners used the full loan available to them.
Only 2% of the homes acquired between February 2016 and September 2018 were bought using a loan of less than 20% of the value of the property at original sale.
Further figures released reveal that the mean purchase price of a property bought under the scheme was £255,542, with buyers using a mean equity loan of £54,630.
The report also highlights that the £10.7bn reached in Q3 2018 is almost as much as the entire police budget for England and Wales in 2018/19, which stood at £12.3bn.
