Last Time Buyer could free up 20 years' housing supply.
A new research report released today by Legal & General, together with the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr), has quantified the size and shape of the UK's "Last Time Buyer"1 (LTB) market for the first time.
In doing so, it has identified 5.3m under-occupied homes in the UK, with 3.3m of LTBs looking to downsize.
These last time buyers are sitting on the equivalent of 2.6m family homes, representing 10 years of housing supply based on Government targets or 20 years based on current housing completions. As such, the LTB market owns 7.7m spare bedrooms and a total of ,~820 billion of housing wealth, set to reach ,~1.2 trillion in 2020. Almost a third (32%) of these older homeowners considered downsizing in the last five years; only 7% actually did.