Mccloud: Move to Germany to buy a house

FIRST-TIME buyers should “move to Germany” to get on the housing ladder, the television presenter Kevin Mccloud has said.

The Grand Designs presenter said his advice to younger buyers would be to target a country with a “healthy and resilient” housing market.

Mccloud told the website Joe: “I look at the UK market and I see nothing good here. My advice is move to Germany, maybe that’s the way forward.”

The average house price in the UK in January was £281,913, according to the UK House Price Index, a rise of 0.5 per cent on December 2023. In London, the average house price is £730,885, according to the property portal Rightmove. The most expensive area in which to buy is the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where the average price is £1.2million.

German house prices dropped by 10.2 per cent in the third quarter of last year, the biggest decrease since records began, as Europe entered a housing crisis. By the end of last year, the German house price index, which is measured as a percentage of 2015 prices, stood at 145.5pc, meaning that a house worth €250,000 in 2015 would now be worth €363,750.

A first-time buyer on an average salary in London must save 10 per cent of take-home pay for 31 years before they will be able to put down a deposit. The equivalent figure in 2003 was 15 years, Telegraph Money analysis found.

The Government was reportedly considering 99 per cent mortgages before Jeremy Hunt’s Spring Budget, but the policy was dropped and no other support for first-time buyers was introduced. Despite this, first-time buyers have bought a record 50 per cent of homes sold in London this year, Hamptons, the estate agency, said.

Mccloud also questioned why Britain is “obsessed” with ownership, pointing to France and Germany as places where renting is the norm.

In Germany, 50.9 per cent of residents are tenants, compared with the EU average of 30.1 per cent, according to European Commission figures.