First-time buyers up to the age of 40 years can now register to purchase a house with a 20 per cent discount.
This is part of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Starter Home initiative, aimed at providing 100,000 new houses to first-time buyers at a discount price.
The scheme is scheduled to last until 2020, after being extended from December 2016. David Cameron has also vowed to increase the number of houses to 200,000 if he is successful in this year’s General Election.
Those who are interested in signing up must register online and hope to be successful. If you are, but sell the house within five years, you will be required to repay the discount. This measure has been introduced in order to prevent people from buying houses cheaply to quickly sell for profit.
The scheme has been launched in an attempt to encourage home ownership and construction on brownfield land (which is land that has been developed previously). He has also promised that these houses will still be built to a high standard, and be energy efficient, despite a lower cost. Some of the charges involved with building a new house have been waived in order to encourage developers to offer discounts.
The scheme should benefit first-time buyers quite significantly, as although they can quite often afford mortgages, deposits in today’s housing market are usually too expensive.