Comment: 'why buying a home with a friend or sibling could take the pressure off your love life'

Buying alone in London is nigh on impossible but don't automatically assume you should buy with a boy- or girlfriend instead
Instagrammers Olamide Soyemi (R)and Cullen Farleigh (L) bought a home together as friends
H&P

Vanishingly few of my acquaintances have managed to buy their first home solo.

As Halifax reports today, almost two-thirds of first-time buyers now buy jointly with another, up from just 48 per cent in 2016.

So is finding love a prerequisite for achieving financial and housing security?

As dispiriting as trawling dating apps is, the endless swiping is even worse if the goal is not simply finding a soulmate, but also affording a home.

And yet, in the current housing market there seem to be few alternatives beyond miraculously doubling your salary and killing your parents (assuming they’re homeowners).

The above being a) unlikely and b) ill-advised, why not take inspiration from the two architects who, struggling to get a mortgage independently, opted to build their own house together instead?

Maybe it’s pat to think finding a friendly solution to the capital’s unaffordable housing meant the pressure was off to find love, but the house did end up being a home for four when both of them moved in their girlfriends.

Of course, the optimum situation would be one where wages and house prices matched up enough that Londoners did not have to buddy up to buy.

Equally many people will at some point choose to buy with a romantic partner because they want to live with them.

Buying with friends also doesn’t always work out if the parameters of how you will both move on are not thrashed out from the start.

I’ll never forget the bitterness in the voice of a man I interviewed who was having to sell at a loss because his co-buyer friend was getting married.

Nonetheless, done right it’s certainly preferable to team up with a friend or sibling than to put all your eggs in one romantic basket out of desperation.

Just make sure you do the paperwork.

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