New £10m scheme to help people buy first home in Jersey

It will be a shared equity scheme, and buyers will own their home outright when the mortgage is paid

The government is set to provide £10m of help to people hoping to buy their first homes in Jersey.

It comes after Jersey saw its average housing prices decrease in 2023 for the first time since 2013, but mortgage rates increased.

Housing Minister Deputy Sam Mezec said he wanted to help as many people as possible with the scheme.

Peter Seymour, director of a loan company, said the £10m would help buy a maximum of 70 homes.

Mr Mezec said buyers would own their home outright when the mortgage was paid.

He said: "In the next few weeks we're going to be launching a scheme of £10m to support first time buyers to help those people who have saved a little bit of money and could convince a mortgage lender to lend the money but for whom it's just not enough.

"It's a shared equity scheme, it's going to be run by Andium Homes, and it will be for homes out there in the open market and those people who now with a bit of extra support from the government will be able to buy them and will own them outright."

The housing price report found that a working household in 2023 was unable to afford a mortgage for a two-bedroom flat, and that two-bedroom flats and four-bedroom houses recorded their highest annual mean prices seen to date.

Mr Seymour said the investment was not enough, and that the government needed to improve the home loan scheme and build "thousands" of new homes to support new buyers.

"The trouble is that £10m is not going to go very far, and I think it'll probably provide homes for maybe 60, 65, maybe 70 purchases, that's all - it's only a drop in the ocean," he said.