ask and thy shall recieve
So it appears miracles do happen, well in installments anyway. The amount of people on the dole has dropped by 15,000. Its largest drop in 3 years.
That aside, peter what your brother needs to do is approach a broker or lending institute and ask them what is needed from him to get a mortgage. In my experience mortgage advisors or bank managers are only to happy to help, after all its how they earn their bread and water
. If a deposit is the problem then they need to look at a way of saving, again the lending broker or manager will give advice (I know of plenty of friends and colleagues who lived on one wage and saved the other, hard yes, but how badly do they want to buy a house?).
I have only just moved into a house and it was a long, tedious, nerve racking experience from the initial 2k deposit to the switching on of electricity (more exciting than getting keys in my opinion
). Only the very few fortunate people find it easy to buy a house (presuming your brother wants to buy a home and not an investment) and that goes back to our parents and our grandparents (most of grandparents never owned their own homes). Moving/buying a house is not known as the most stressful of times in a persons life for noting.
Owning a home sadly is not a right. Should it be? Well only putting pressure on your local TD can change that. Is it good value to spend so much on a house? This is a very personal issue. What are you paying in rent? Do you have a family? And finaly, location, location, location. Where do you want to live? Would you sacrafice on standard of home or location of home?