[lurgburg]

> It let me buy a property which I wouldn't be able to without HTB

Possibly you're taking the wrong counterfactual here?

"If I hadn't HTB but everyone else did" vs "If no-one had HTB".

It's possible you're quite right about the first, but it tells us little about the second. Possibly in the presence of HTB, prices just rise again until they reach their equilibrium of just-barely-affordable.

[iso1210]

House price doesn't matter, it's the deposit. HTB may have pushed up the house price by say 30%, but it meant the deposit was lower (12k rather than 18k) and the repayments were lower for the first 5 years.

[fennecfoxy]

House price does matter. End of the day with the bump-ed up H2B house prices...sure you can afford it w/ lower deposit thanks to gov assistance...but it's not free money. You still have to pay it back, so the seller is making an extra 30% of our backs bc they bumped the prices thanks to this scheme that was meant to "help" people.

[dogma1138]

People don’t pay them back no one can pay back 40% after 5 years assuming they bought in London.

If they do pay it back they do it by remortgaging so the builders win, the banks win, the tax payer pays for any HTB loans that aren’t repaid and the tax payer gets shafted with higher housing costs.

[dogma1138]

The deposit doesn’t matter, what matters is the total loan amount.

For a £500K flat you need a £50K deposit but you also need a household income of £100K or more to be able to borrow £450K as banks cap the maximum amount they’ll loans at 4-4.5 of your annual income.

So HTB didn’t only increase the prices it also pushed people to take on loans that they normally would not be able to afford.