The average first-time buyer price is £256k - but what does it buy in our area?

“Affordable” used to mean rather modest-sounding (by today’s standards), five-figure sums, but thanks to property price inflation over the last decade or two, five figures won’t get you an awful lot, particularly in our area of Yorkshire In fact, if you want a house, you will only get a part-share for less than £100,000. That’s actually a good way of getting onto the housing ladder, but if you want a whole share, you’ll have to pay rather more.

The average first-time buyer house price in 1969 was about £4,100.

By 1980 it was in the high teens of thousands and by 1990 it was about £45,000.

By 2000 it was almost £65,000 and by 2010 it had leapt to around £140,000.

Last year, 2020, the average price paid by a first-time buyer in the UK was £256,057, up by £22,939 or 10 per cent from a year earlier, according to Halifax, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender.

The average deposit paid by a first-time buyer in the UK increased to £57,278 in 2020. This was compared to £46,449 the previous year.

As is often the case with property data, this figure is inflated by the influence of Greater London, where the average deposit was £130,357 – more than twice what it was in the surrounding area of the South East, and more than triple the average Yorkshire deposit of £33,313.

So what can a first-time buyer – or anyone else, for that matter – actually get in our area for £256,057? The following three properties, which are all currently on the market for very similar prices, will give you some idea.

In Harrogate, 36 Chatsworth Place is a three-storey terraced house between Skipton Road and King’s Road, within walking distance of the town centre. It has four bedrooms, dining kitchen, utility room and lounge, and outside there is a patio garden with a decked seating area, plus summerhouse, which is currently used as a gym. To the front there is unrestricted on-street parking.

In Knaresborough, 7 Hambleton Terrace is a stone-built terraced property off Stockwell Lane. It too has four bedrooms, kitchen and sitting room, and also has the added benefit of an externally-accessed three-quarter-height cellar room. There are gardens to the front and back, as well as an inbuilt barbecue and garden shed.

Finally, 2 Railway Cottages is one of a row of redbrick-and-pantile, two-up-two-down properties built for railway workers at Littlethorpe, on the other side of the A61 from Ripon. The railway has long since gone, but thankfully, these characterful additions to the village remain.

This house has two bedrooms, sitting room and dining kitchen which open up at the back onto the paved back garden. It also has a single garage and garden shed, as well as views to the rear across open fields.