Financial Insights That Matter
Mortgage sales for first-time buyers in the UK have reached their lowest point in over a decade, with new data revealing that 2023 marked the fewest first-time buyer mortgages since 2013.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) analysed data from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and found 282,000 new first-time buyer mortgages in 2023 – down from the peak of 394,000 in 2021.
This drop comes after a period of strong growth in the early 2010s, when first-time buyer mortgages steadily increased following the 2008 global financial crisis.
In 2023, first-time buyer mortgages accounted for 38.4% of all residential property sales, up from 28% a decade earlier. The surge in first-time buyer activity following the 2008 crash was followed by a major dip during the pandemic. In 2020, the number of first-time buyer mortgages fell to just 297,000, amid lockdown restrictions and economic uncertainty.
However, the following year saw a rebound, with 2021 reaching the highest number of new mortgages in recent years, largely driven by the temporary stamp duty holiday, which ran from June 2020 to July 2021.
Since 2021, though, the trend has reversed, with sales dropping by nearly 30% between 2021 and 2023, landing at 282,000 – a figure not seen since 2013. Despite this, the proportion of first-time buyers relative to overall housing sales has continued to rise steadily.
Between 2006 and 2008, fewer than a quarter of residential sales were made up of first-time buyer mortgages. This figure grew to around one-third (33.8%) by 2018, and by 2023, it had reached 38.4%. This shift is largely due to a faster decline in overall housing sales between 2021 and 2023 (-39.8%) compared to the fall in first-time buyer mortgage sales (-28.6%).
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