A NEW map has revealed the cheapest areas in the UK to get onto the property ladder.
Rightmove experts said that house-hunters can snag great property deals in five big UK cities.
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They named Bradford in West Yorkshire as the UK’s cheapest city for first-time buyers, with £104,643 the average asking price for a two-bed home.
Bradford’s market-beating house prices make for affordable mortgages, with monthly repayments estimated at around £521.
With the average two-bed going for £104,784, the UK’s next cheapest city is Carlisle in Cumbria – where the average monthly mortgage bill is £522.
The Scottish cities of Aberdeen and Dundee took third and fifth place on the list, with house prices only a few grand more expensive than in Bradford or Carlisle.
Scotland also offers biggest monthly savings in cash terms for first-time buyers – with the average monthly mortgage payment for a first home in Glasgow being £215 cheaper than the average rent.
Fourth place on the list of cheapest spots for house-hunters went to Hull, where the average home costs £106,939 and mortgage repayments are around £532.
Unsurprisingly, the most expensive city for first-time buyers is London – where a two-bed property costs nearly five times as much as in Bradford.
Within London, the average monthly mortgage payment for a first-time buyer was put at £2,533.
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Excluding the capital, St Albans in Hertfordshire was named as the priciest city to get on the property ladder, with average monthly mortgage payments calculated at £1,958.
The leafy cathedral city is popular with families and commuters, with train links into London.
Third place on the list of pricey spots goes to Bath, with Cambridge and Oxford taking fourth and fifth.
Property website Rightmove looked at average asking prices for typical first-time buyer-type homes with a maximum of two bedrooms in 60 major urban locations across Britain to make the findings.
The research made several assumptions, including that first-time buyers had a 10% deposit and would be paying back their mortgage over 25 years.
Across Britain, a typical first-time buyer home has a record price tag of £226,399, Rightmove said.
Rightmove’s property expert Tim Bannister said: “For those who are able to save up the deposit, it’s still cheaper to pay off a mortgage as a first-time buyer in many areas than pay the equivalent in monthly rent – despite prices reaching a new record at a national level and mortgage rates rising.
“It highlights how frenetic the rental market has been for a long time now, with many areas continuing to see record rents and fierce competition between tenants for the properties available.
“It helps to explain why we’re seeing such determination from first-time buyers to continue to get onto the ladder despite the economic headwinds that they face – and why we’re seeing buyers increasingly return to cities while a bigger proportion of renters are looking to move away.”
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