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New grants to ease homebuyer difficulties?
11 April 2008 10:30
The government is to issue grants to buyers in shared homeownership schemes, although the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) is sceptical about this initiative.
A total of £3 million has been set aside to offer as grants of up to £1,500 to priority buyers who take up shared equity loans as part of the government's Open Market HomeBuy scheme, so as to help them meet costs such as solicitors' charges and fees.
Prime minister Gordon Brown explained that the programme aimed to provide assistance to the first-time buyers who need it, enabling low-income key workers, including nurses and teachers, to afford the new homes they desire.
Yet RICS responded that shared ownership schemes only involve low numbers of borrowers and can therefore only ever operate as one of a range of measures, rather than as a solution to the property market's affordability problems in themselves.
It instead called on the government to free up more land for development so more houses can be built, as well as ensuring that many of these properties are designed as family homes and that more empty houses are also brought back into use.
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