Nationwide brings in radical change for customers who earn £50,000

Nationwide is bringing in a change for mortgage borrowers who earn £50,000. Nationwide is offering a boost to first-time buyers by lending up to six times their income. Couples earning £50,000-a-year can borrow £300,000 towards their first home under the Helping Hand scheme “assuming a five per cent deposit and no other costs impact affordability”, the bank said.

Debbie Crosbie, Nationwide’s Chief Executive, said this week: “Helping Hand has supported around 40,000 people onto the property ladder since we launched it three years ago. We want to do more and are boosting the scheme to six times income and increasing the maximum loan size.

"This, alongside our most recent rate cuts, further strengthens our market-leading position and demonstrates that, as one of the UK’s largest lenders, Nationwide continues to put first-time buyers first.”

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Paul Broadhead, head of mortgage and housing policy at the BSA, said: "Becoming a first-time buyer is possibly the most expensive it has been over at least the last 70 years, but a properly functioning housing market is dependent on first-time buyers being able to afford their first home. New thinking and radical changes are needed."

NAEA (National Association of Estate Agents) Propertymark president Toby Leek said: “Affordability for many is a real issue and, as purse strings remain tightened despite easing factors such as slight drops in inflation, prospective and current home-owners will be looking to enter the market with caution, but also, in some cases, further flexibility in where they nest themselves."

Nationwide also said it would cut mortgage rates and that “first-time buyer rates will be reduced by up to 0.31 percentage points, making Nationwide the first major lender to offer a sub-5% rate on its standard range to those with a five per cent deposit”.

Nationwide is the largest building society in the UK.