Are we actually set up to support first-time buyers?

After a summer spent thinking it over, this time of year is often the point where first time buyers decide whether they’re going to push on and be in their new home for Christmas, or hold off for another 12 months.

It’s a good moment, therefore, to take stock of what the first time buyer market actually looks like right now, and whether the industry is genuinely set up to support it.

It’s great to see lenders continuing to look at what more they can do in this space. Despite everything going on globally this year, we’ve continued to see an uplift in first time buyers getting on the ladder throughout 2026, which says a lot about the resilience of this end of the market.

Nevertheless, this is a moment for everyone in the industry to ask themselves a genuine question: what are you actually doing to support first time buyers? The average first time buyer today is in their early-to-mid thirties, with a median age of 34, and that shift in itself tells us something important. Have we really built the solutions today’s first time buyers need, or are we still working from assumptions about who a first time buyer is that no longer holds up?

That question matters even more against the backdrop of the FCA’s ongoing work on interest-only lending, affordability, and age-related criteria. If lenders get this right, there’s a genuine opportunity here, not just to better serve the first time buyers we have today, but to help bring that average age back down, and get more people onto the ladder in their mid-to-late twenties rather than their thirties.

That has to be the ambition, rather than simply accepting today’s average as the new normal.

There’s another question worth asking too, and it’s one I don’t think we talk about enough: do first time buyers still want to buy flats? Or are we heading towards a market where first-time buyers are set on houses, and flats increasingly become the domain of landlords?

I don’t have a firm answer to that yet, but it’s exactly the kind of question the industry should be asking itself now, rather than waiting to see how the market answers it for us.

None of this has easy answers, but that’s precisely why it’s worth raising. The first time buyer of today looks different to the first time buyer of a decade ago, and the products, criteria, and conversations we build around them need to keep pace, not lag behind.