First-time buyer inquiries fall 27 percent in Britain

First-time buyer inquiries fell 27 percent in the week to November 8 against the same week a year earlier, according to the property website Zoopla. The same week brought the Bank of England's first base-rate rise in more than three years, from 3.75 to 4 percent, pushing up mortgage costs for some borrowers.

Richard Donnell, Zoopla's executive director, calls first-time buyers 'the engine of the housing market' — they accounted for four in ten sales last year. That engine is idling by choice: mortgage rates have tracked expectations of further base-rate increases all year, and last week's decision, in Donnell's words, is making more buyers pause and wait. Those still moving find more homes to choose from, particularly at the affordable end, and his message to sellers is that buyers have more choice, so 'pricing realistically is increasingly important.' Propertymark, the agents' body, reports steady buyer registrations and stable numbers of new listings — the queue of hopeful sellers has not shortened to match the departing demand.

The continent shows what a decade of that mismatch produces. EU house prices rose 62 percent in the ten years to the second quarter of 2026, and Eurostat's price-to-income ratio climbed 6.8 percent across the bloc between 2015 and 2025. The average conceals the spread. Portugal's ratio widened 60.8 percent, the bloc's worst; Mike Langen, senior housing economist at ABN AMRO, credits a tourism boom and a golden-visa program that pulled in foreign capital. The Netherlands follows at 34.3 percent on housing shortage plus investor demand, with Hungary, Czechia, Spain and Greece all above 20 percent.

At the other end, Romania's ratio fell 42.8 percent — the largest improvement in the EU — as income growth outpaced prices after accession. Yet in 2025, 56 percent of Romanians paying market rent lived in households spending more than 40 percent of disposable income on housing, the highest share in the Union. Homes cheap relative to incomes are not the same as homes cheap to live in.

Across the EU as a whole, the 2025 ratio sat 0.03 percent above its long-term average. The affordability crisis is less a continental aberration than a concentration: Ronan Lyons, an associate professor of economics at Trinity College Dublin, notes that the worst-hit countries pair strong demand in their main cities with supply that has struggled to keep up. The European Commission presented its Affordable Housing Plan in December 2025 in response to the bloc's housing crisis.

In Britain the same arithmetic is being settled week by week. A market where four in ten sales rest on first-time buyers has just watched more than a quarter of them stop asking.