Fewer than one in every 100 homes in London is affordable for a typical working family trying to get on the property ladder, a report has found.
Shelter, the housing charity, analysed more than 325,000 properties for sale with at least two bedrooms across England, and found that just 17.9 per cent of them were within the financial reach of a couple on an average local wage with children.
Out of the total properties analysed, just 86 were found to be affordable to typical families in the whole of London — 0.3 per cent of those assessed in the capital.
In the wider South East region, only 4.2 per cent of properties were deemed to be within their means.
The report warned that the “drought” of affordable homes for typical working families was not just confined to the South. Even in the North East, where the highest proportion of affordable family properties was found, almost two thirds — 62.7 per cent — were still found to be out of the average local family’s reach. In Exeter, Devon, out of 553 homes for sale analysed, only eight, were affordable.
In 14 of the local authority areas examined, no homes for sale were deemed affordable for young families starting out. These were: Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, Camden, Ealing, Brent, Richmond upon Thames, Kingston upon Thames, Waltham Forest, Islington, Sutton, Slough, Epsom and Ewell, Adur in West Sussex and Watford.
Researchers looked at properties for sale on the property website Zoopla during a single day in April.
For a property to be deemed “affordable”, they assumed that the typical first-time buyer would put down an 18 per cent deposit and borrow around 3.4 times their income. Incomes were adjusted to reflect the lower ages of first-time buyers.
Campbell Robb, the chief executive of Shelter, said: “When a family looking to buy their first home searches a whole town for a place to live and finds nothing they can afford, it’s clear we’re not just facing a housing shortage any more: it’s a full-blown drought.”
The numbers and percentages of homes on the market which were found to be affordable to families with children in each region, according to Shelter:
:: North East, 9,748, 37.3%
:: North West, 16,134, 29.8%
:: Yorkshire and the Humber, 12,440, 31.3%
:: East Midlands, 6,070, 19.5%
:: West Midlands, 7,465, 22.6%
:: East, 2,174, 7.1%
:: London, 86, 0.3%
:: South East, 1,712, 4.2%
:: South West, 2,437, 6.0%
:: England, 58,266, 17.9%