Joanne McNally is, by any measure, doing well. The Irish comedian is one half of My Therapist Ghosted Me, one of the biggest podcasts in the UK and Ireland, with a sold-out stand-up career to match. She isn’t someone you’d expect to still be renting in her forties.
And yet, earlier this year she announced on the pod that at 42, she had just bought her first home, alone, in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
“I’ve been renting all my life,” she said, “and as a single person, it’s fucking hard buying houses, especially in London.”
She’s not wrong. And her story — successful, established, finally on the ladder well into her forties — turns out to be less of an anomaly and more of a sign of the times.
According to research from Skipton Group, the average age of a first-time buyer in England has risen to 34, up from just 29 in the mid-1990s. More telling still: back then, a quarter of all first-time buyers were under 25. Today, that figure has collapsed to just 6%. An entire generation has effectively been priced out of their twenties.
More than half of first-time buyers now need two incomes to get a mortgage, up from 40% in the 90s. Deposits are larger, mortgages are longer, with more than half of buyers now signing up for 30 years or more. And almost one in three deposits now rely on a gift from family. If you don’t have that safety net, and many people don’t, the climb gets significantly steeper.
Joanne was open about the irony of it all: her mum, a boomer, bought her house for “20 grand back in the day.” An entire property, for what now wouldn’t cover a deposit in most of the country.
The good news, if there is any, is that Joanne got there. Georgian house, garden, turnkey, four minutes from her best friend. It took longer than it should have, cost more than it should have, and came with a substantial mortgage she’s cheerfully funding via brand deals, but she got there.
For the millions of people still waiting for their version of that moment, the data suggests the wait is only getting longer.