Revealed: ages, incomes and purchase plans for buyers with mortgages

New figures from the Mortgage Advice Bureau give an insight into the changing demographics of home buyers and buy to let investors.

In a snapshot of its customer base for September this year, the broker reveals that the average age of an applicant for a mortgage is 36; within that, the average first time buyer is 31 and a typical buy to let applicant is 45.

The loan sought by a typical first time buyer home that month was £153,533 - around £1,500 more than a year before; the actual purchase price of a FTB property was £210,216 last month - about £2,000 more than a year earlier. Meanwhile a FTB applicant’s average salary was £31,388 which was 1.61 per cent up on 12 months before.

For existing owners seeking a mortgage for the next house purchase, the average loan was £170,996 - roughly unchanged from the 2017 figure. Their typical purchase price was £243,009 which was almost £3,000 less than last year, while their average salary showed a small increase on 2017 at the current level of £36,129.

Buy to let mortgage applicants are clearly tightening their belt a little. Their average loan was £127,123 - down from well over £135,000 some 12 months ago. Their average purchase price is also down, by over five per cent, to £189,577. Their average salary is a (perhaps surprisingly modest) £39,270 - that just over 1.3 per cent more than a year ago.

In terms of the mortgage market as a whole, MAB acknowledges that recent surveys show an increasingly cautious ‘wait and see’ tone amongst buyers but it says that “outside of London and the South East, in many pockets the ‘keep calm and carry on’ rhetoric appears to be prevailing, which is very encouraging.”