House prices: Renting to overtake home ownership among young, says PwC

More than half of the under 40s will be renting homes from private landlords in the UK in 10 years' time, accountancy firm PwC has predicted.

It suggests house prices will rise at an average of 5% a year, pricing the typical home at £360,000 by 2020.

Industry figures show that first-time buyers typically need to find a deposit of 18% to secure a mortgage.

Using PwC data, that would equate to a requirement for £64,800 in savings to get on the property ladder in 2020.

"Driven by a decade of soaring house prices before the financial crisis and lower loan-to-value ratios post-crisis, the deposits needed by first time buyers have risen significantly. As a result, a generation of private renters have emerged and this will increasingly be the norm for the 20 to 39 age group," said Richard Snook, senior economist at PwC.

"There is also a rising dichotomy in the market between those - mostly older - households who own outright and those - mostly younger - households who still have a mortgage or rent to pay."

Ownership

Ownership issues for young adults would become more acute owing to a lack of supply in affordable housing, the PwC report suggested.

The contrast between young and old would be marked by the number of people owning their homes having bought in cash or having paid off a mortgage.

The number of homes owned outright would rise from 8.4 million now to 10.6 million by 2025, accounting for 35% of the total, PwC said.

Overall, it predicted that the proportion of residents who owned the home they lived in would drop from its peak of 70% in the middle of the last decade to about 60% in 2025.

About 7.2 million households would be private tenants in 10 years' time, it suggested.

The recently-published English Housing Survey found that, in 2013-14, some 48% of households made up of 25 to 34-year-olds rented their home from a private landlord.

This had risen from 45% a year earlier, and from 21% in 2003-04.

Over the same 10 years, owner occupation in this age group dropped from 59% to 36%.

In 2013-14, of the 22.6 million households in England, 7.4 million owned their property outright, and 6.9 million had a mortgage, the survey showed. The rest rented their homes.