Young adults have become increasingly dependent on financial support from their parents to finance their first house purchases.
Those without access to parental support (i.e. those with poorer parents) are less likely to be able to get on the property ladder.
This is according to the latest research from the Resolution Foundation with examines the impact on parental wealth on home ownership, exploring the relationship between parental support and the ability of young adults today to purchase their first property.
Some of the key findings of the report were as follows:
The children of wealthier parents are much more likely to become homeowners themselves: from the mid 2000s, children with parents with property wealth were three times as likely to become homeowners as those without property wealth.
The children of wealthier parents become homeowners at an earlier age than those of less wealthy parents.
The report also found that:
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- This relationship continues to hold even once someone’s salary, their education, where they live and whether they are in a couple or not are all taken into account.
- The relationship between parental wealth and their children’s homeownership has risen over time.
The significance of these statistics:
This is bleak reading for anyone interested in economic equality, because this trend suggests that what’s occurring here is the reproduction of class inequality.
The findings of this report will probably come as no surprise to anyone, it just seems to be confirming what is really damn obvious!
This report is probably a good example of a document that’s been produced because of a value-agenda (so the choice of topic is not value free!) and yet the research is probably ‘objective’ in the sense that it’s difficult to bias these figures…. finances tend to be ‘hard statistics’ and it’s difficult for researchers to skew them, even if they want a certain outcome!
