The Help to Buy: Equity Loan scheme will close to new applications at 6pm on Monday 31st October 2022, meaning there are just days left to take advantage.

To be eligible for an equity loan, buyers must apply by 31st October and reserve a home.

You need to legally complete by 31st March 2023 and are expected to have the keys to your home by 6pm.

Key statistics on the scheme

From 1st April 2013 to 31st 2022 March 2022,361,075 properties were bought with an equity loan.

The total value of these equity loans so far totals £22.5 billion.

Under the scheme the government lent homebuyers between 5% and 20% of the cost of a newly built home (up to 40% in London). The buyer had to put up at least a 5% deposit with the remainder taken as a mortgage.

Was it a success?

Myron Jobson, senior personal finance analyst at interactive investor, said: “Over 361,000 properties were bought under the scheme, giving hundreds of thousands of people a leg up onto the property ladder.

“However, while well intentioned, the scheme had an unintended consequence of artificially inflating portions of the housing market, with developers hiking up prices for their Help to Buy-eligible homes.

“The end of the Help to Buy scheme could not have come at a worse time for first-time buyers, with rising mortgage rates, inflated house prices and the cost-of-living crunch pricing many wannabe homeowners out of the property market.”

Jobson added that the likelihood of higher interest rates to combat soaring inflation means things are “set to get tougher from an affordability perspective – with fast-rising rents offering no respite”.

And he suggested it’s possible that we may “see a replacement scheme take its place in the coming months to ease the plight of first-time buyers”.

“The government is busying itself to devising a formula to stimulate economic growth ahead of the Autumn Budget – and a robust housing market is a key ingredient to this end,” explained Jobson.