For many young people like me, buying a first home is seen as an initial step on the journey to financial contentment.
I am 27 and achieved this milestone almost exactly two years ago, with my now wife, when we bought our first home in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, for £185,000.
It’s a three-bedroom end terrace dating from the mid-19th century, and was a bit of a renovation project when we moved in.
In the past two years, we’ve set about doing the work required on the assumption that it would increase the home’s value and that we’d later be able to sell at a profit, helping us move up the housing ladder to a bigger property.
The main bathroom, previously fully clad in PVC across the walls, floor, and ceiling, has been entirely replaced.
We’ve removed the old patterned carpet from the hallways and stairs and have swapped it with a real wooden floor. The crumbling chimney stack has been entirely rebuilt and peeling wallpaper has been removed; replastering and repainting has followed. It has been a labour of love.
It is unfortunate, then, that having done all of this, our attempts to sell appeared to have shown us that this fabled property ladder no longer exists.
In Northern Ireland, where I live, house prices increased by 9.5 per cent between the start of 2024 and 2025 – far higher growth than in the rest of the UK.
Adam and his wife bought their first home in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, for £185,000 in 2024 (Photo: Adam James Pollock)Though this poses challenges for new buyers, it meant we expected to see some sort of gain when we came to sell – even before we considered the money we had plunged into improving the property.
Due to the renovations, multiple estate agents suggested that we could expect to attract a price approximately 24 per cent more than we paid for it and so we have now listed it at £230,000.
Despite this, in the month that our property has been listed, we have had very little interest and only one viewing.
It appears not to be the marketing – the property has been the most viewed property on Northern Ireland’s main property website, attracting tens of thousands of views.
This lack of interest is putting the next move on hold for us.
We were hoping to move to a slightly larger property. We both work from home and would like to have additional space at home to allow us to do so more comfortably. As we would also like to have children in the not-too-distant future, sacrificing spare bedrooms for office space doesn’t make sense.
We also don’t have much in the way of a back garden, as this is the only place we can park our cars and our dog would appreciate some grass to run around on.
I have thought about the puzzling lack of interest and why it could be the case.
It’s clear it’s down, at least in part, to the situation society faces economically.
With rising mortgage rates, financial uncertainties related to the war in Iran, historically high energy prices and prohibitive stamp duty fees, the money people have available to spend on moving home is falling, at least in real terms.
Our estate agents say they have been experiencing a sharp decline in buyer confidence and general interest in properties so far in 2026 and this is backed up by other data.
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) UK Residential Survey for March 2026 found the market losing momentum as rising borrowing costs and wider geopolitical uncertainty weighed heavily on buyer confidence and sales activity.
New buyer enquiries fell to a net balance of -39 per cent, down from -29 per cent in February, marking the weakest reading since August 2023.
It seems people simply do not have the money to move home for the price that sellers are hoping for and have been told they can expect.
The front of Adam’s new home. Adam says house prices in Northern Ireland increased by 9.5 per cent between the start of 2024 and 2025 (Photo: Adam James Pollock)It seems that the housing ladder as experienced by homemovers in years gone by is no longer a guaranteed path upwards.
Previous generations were able to benefit greatly from relatively cheap credit, rising wages, and an average house price to earnings ratio much lower than is currently the case.
Coupled with an expanding population and a limited housing supply, this meant that previous generations could buy smaller, less expensive properties, watch the material value of these properties inflate faster than wages, and over a short period of time roll these paper gains into funding a larger property without needing vastly increased mortgage repayments.
This is a far cry from what myself and other younger buyers are experiencing today.
Political parties are realising this is a problem and have begun to attempt to solve it. Both the Conservative Party and Reform UK have pledged forms of stamp duty abolition. At the same time, there are consistent calls to help with reducing the cost of living and, largely, energy prices from across the political spectrum.
While helpful, these measures are not likely to have a drastic effect on the affordability of housing.What it needs is simply for people to have more money.
We need wages in the UK to catch up to where they really ought to be. Until then, making it farther than the first rung of the property ladder may be little more than a pipe dream for the youth of today.
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