The number of first-time home buyers in the UK hit its highest level since the start of the financial crisis in the first half of the year, helped by the recovering economy and government policies such as Help to Buy, a survey showed on Saturday.
First-time buyers accounted for 46 percent of all purchases between January and last month, the highest proportion since 2000, with the number surging by 25 percent to an estimated 144,500, according to mortgage lender Halifax PLC.
British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne launched the Help to Buy mortgage guarantee scheme last year, saying he wanted to help would-be home-buyers who were unable to pay large deposits, in particular first-time buyers.
Critics of the plan say it risks pushing up prices and will do little to spur new home-building. The IMF said last month that Help to Buy might need to be scrapped if the growth of the scheme leads to the risk of a housing bubble in the UK.
Official data released in May showed Help to Buy accounted for only a fraction of mortgages in the early months of the year, but the existence of the program is believed to have boosted high-deposit lending more generally.
A separate scheme, called Funding for Lending, has helped bring down the cost of borrowing although it was revised at the start of the year and no longer includes mortgages.
Halifax said mortgage affordability had improved sharply since the 2008 and 2009 recession. In the first half of the year, first-time buyers spent 31 percent of disposable income on mortgage payments, down from 47 percent in the same period in 2007.
The national average of first-time buyers deposit was ￡31,129 (US$53,300) in the second quarter, an increase of 9 percent from the same period last year, Halifax said. First-time buyers in London put down the largest average deposit, more than 4.5 times higher than those in northwest England.
As deposits and property prices have risen, so too has the age of those entering the housing market. The average age of a first-time buyer is 30 nationally, up from 28 in 2009, and is 32 in London.
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) yesterday said Taiwan’s government plans to set up a business service company in Kyushu, Japan, to help Taiwanese companies operating there. “The company will follow the one-stop service model similar to the science parks we have in Taiwan,” Kuo said. “As each prefecture is providing different conditions, we will establish a new company providing services and helping Taiwanese companies swiftly settle in Japan.” Kuo did not specify the exact location of the planned company but said it would not be in Kumamoto, the Kyushu prefecture in which Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC, 台積電) has a
China has threatened severe economic retaliation against Japan if Tokyo further restricts sales and servicing of chipmaking equipment to Chinese firms, complicating US-led efforts to cut the world’s second-largest economy off from advanced technology. Senior Chinese officials have repeatedly outlined that position in recent meetings with their Japanese counterparts, people familiar with the matter said. Toyota Motor Corp privately told officials in Tokyo that one specific fear in Japan is that Beijing could react to new semiconductor controls by cutting the country’s access to critical minerals essential for automotive production, the people said, declining to be named discussing private affairs. Toyota is among
RSS