First-time buyer searches in July came in at their lowest proportion of overall enquiries, falling to 16.7%, than at any point over the last five years, according to Twenty7tec.

Despite searches for these key buyers lifting 12.5% to 269,419 last month compared to June, and coming in at the same percentage higher than a year ago, this was still the lowest proportion of all searches year-to-date since 2020 on the mortgage search engine’s platform.

In 2020, the firm handled a total of 12.6 million mortgage searches, 2.4 million of which were FTB searches, or 17.8% of the market.

In 2021, this cohort peaked amid 15 million total mortgage searches with 3 million FTB searches, almost 20% of the market.

The platform adds that this number stayed high in 2022, with FTB searches at 18.5% of the market, and then started to decline to 17.7% of the market in 2023 to 16.7% of the market where it stands today.

FTB purchases typically represent around a third of the UK market.

Twenty7tec director Nathan Reilly says: “While FTB searches are up when we look at the monthly data and even when we compare it to the same time last year, the worrying thing we’re seeing is that year to date, they are the lowest out of all mortgage searches.

“We need a buoyant FTB market for the whole market to function, and so the government needs to reinvigorate this part of the market to keep everything running smoothly for all homeowners and prospective homeowners house buyers.

Reilly adds: “During the general election, Labour promised to keep mortgage rates as low as possible and delivered its idea of a Freedom to Buy mortgage scheme, which, although there’s little information about it yet, plans to encourage lenders to offer high loan-to-value mortgage deals by removing some of the risks from them.

“But we’re now in an interesting period because there have never been as many mortgage products available to buyers on the market – especially those which offer high loan-to-value ratios and yet FTBs as a percentage of the market are still lagging behind where they should be.

“The previous high was March 2020, and it’s now 10% higher. There have never been more products at 75%, 80%, 85%, and 95% LTV.

“This could indicate that Labour needs to get more creative with its thinking, and potentially look at the innovation from Skipton and Accord in this space, to really convince FTBs that they are able to get on the housing ladder.”