One in five mortgage applicants is now a first home buyer in the UK

UK first home buyers had vanished from the property market when the credit crisis began, but have come out of the woodwork and now account for 20 percent of mortgage applications at one of Britain's biggest brokers.
In Australia the figures went from one in six and is now one in four home buyers that are first time home buyers. The difference is largely due to the First Home Owners Grant Boost that exists in Australia.
According to John Charcol, 21percent of purchasers using the broker in April were first-time buyers. The figure dropped as low as 4.1 percent in October last year.
The John Charcol Index, the broker's monthly mortgage activity monitor, revealed a sharp increase in the proportion of purchases made by first-time buyers in the first four months of this year, with that proportion being three and a half times higher than in the previous four months.

The return of significantly more first-time buyers in to the market this
year, despite the lack of low-deposit mortgages, is one of the best indicators
of confidence we've got at the moment

"A surprising number of first-time buyers have managed to find deposits of at least 25 percent in order to access a wider choice of mortgages and get a cheaper deal." Many were borrowing money from their parents to raise the deposits required by lenders, he added.
The broker also reported that fixed-rate mortgages now accounted for 82 percent of its customers' applications.
It said: "The proportion of applications for fixed-rate mortgages continued to climb in the last month, from 81percent in March to 82 percent of all business written by John Charcol in April. "This number is over 70 percent higher than the proportion of fixed-rate applications in January, when it stood at 48 percent."

Australian Real Estate: The first "green shoots" of a property comeback?

The economic news in Australia has been better than most other countries, but the recession here may be only just beginning, but no has told that to cashed up first home buyers.
However the home buyers in Australia have shown that they believe that they can weather the downturn and have been buying homes and keeping Mortgage Brokers and the Major Banks alike busy writing home loans.
The upturn in the mortgage business has been due mostly to the impending first home owners grant deadline, and of course low interest rates, neither of which can last forever.
Interestingly, the top of the market homes that were the easiest to sell in the boom can't find buyers right now, whilst the mortgage belt homes are being googled up.
This is due to investors moving back into the market [the ones that sold up last year to put there money into super and the stock market must be really hurting] and the first home buyers which as a market segment has doubled in the last 12 months.
And when you add to this the landslide of first home buyers entering the market the two together have had the effect of supporting home prices in this soft market, so we will not be seeing [hopefully] the downturns in property values that our cousin in the US have had to suffer. The third and suprising factor is that Australians are bullish about Australia being able to weather the storm.
Lets hope that this optimism is well founded and we see a slow down in the number of business failures and unemployment that we have endure over the past few months. But whether you have a job or not, you still have to live somewhere, right?
One thing that I have always wondered about is the mercy factor in small business.
If you have to sack someone is it easier to sack the guy who does not have a mortgage over the one that does? I know that employers used to favour married employees with their own home, and maybe its becasue of the "I need to keep this job" concern, or maybe it because people that are prepared to make long term commitments, make for long term employees?