Britain’s young adults increasingly are priced out of the housing market and are living with their parents later into life after “giving up on property.”
(Bloomberg) — Britain’s young adults increasingly are priced out of the housing market and are living with their parents later into life after “giving up on property.”
That’s the conclusion of both official figures from the census and a report from the real estate website Zoopla, which dubbed the group “Guppies” in contrast to the aspirational professionals from the 1980s known as “Yuppies.”
About 51% of people in England and Wales aged 20 to 24 opted to live with their parents, census data collected in 2021 and released Wednesday showed. That’s up 7 points from the figures collected in 2011. More than one-in-10 of those aged 30 to 34 also are living with their parents, up from 8.6% a decade earlier.
The figures follow more than a decade of soaring house prices that have made it more difficult for buyers of all ages to finance a purchase. While prices have fallen in recent months, they’re still more than 20% higher than they were at the start of the pandemic.
“Younger people today face far more barriers to getting on the housing ladder than previous generations,” said Daniel Copley, consumer expert at Zoopla.
Zoopla said 14.4% of British people under the age of 40 who don’t own their own home said that they were living with their parents, while only 14.1% reported that they were planning to purchase their own property.
Even among more wealthy people earning £60,000 ($76,400) a year, buying a property is more difficult, with 38% of those surveyed by Zoopla giving up on a purchase in the next decade. Just one in five say they’ll “definitely” be able to get on the housing ladder.
The situation is set to remain difficult given the current high interest-rate environment. “The backdrop of macroeconomic uncertainty and cost-of-living pressures affected consumer demand during the year,” homebuilder Bellway Plc’s Chief Executive Officer Jason Honeyman said in a trading update earlier Wednesday. “Given affordability remains constrained by higher mortgage interest rates, underlying trading conditions are likely to remain challenging in the near term.”
–With assistance from Eamon Akil Farhat and Andrew Atkinson.
(Updates with comments on outlook. An earlier version corrected age range in third paragraph)
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