Looking for comments from property experts on how an acceleration of the great wealth transfer (more young people receiving large gifts) could impact the housing market, on a tight deadline for The I Paper. Thank you!

Earlier inheritance gifting could become one of the biggest drivers of inequality in the UK housing market over the next decade.
Buyers receiving large financial gifts from parents or grandparents are likely to enter the market sooner, compete more aggressively, and access better mortgage rates due to lower loan-to-values.
The danger is that homeownership increasingly becomes determined not by income or affordability alone, but by whether your family has property wealth to pass on.
In some parts of the market, particularly among first-time buyers, this could fuel higher prices and make competition even tougher for buyers without family support.
We may also see lenders continue adapting products around gifted deposits and intergenerational wealth, because family-backed borrowing is becoming far more common than it was even five years ago.

Gifted deposits from family members to buy property are becoming more common. This week, I was discussing estate planning with a client, especially with the pension changes next year looming, and they were planning to gift a large sum to one of their children to help them get on the housing ladder. This will certainly help increase activity in the first-time buyer market, but could feed into higher up the property ladder. There is a growing sentiment to give with a warm hand rather than a cold one once the government has taken its cut.

This is classic supply and demand in action – but with a sharp twist. Landlords are flooding the market with first-time buyer properties, desperate to exit amid the Renters’ Rights Act, sky-high mortgage costs and a punishing tax regime that has killed off buy-to-let.
At the same time, the great wealth transfer is accelerating hard. Thanks to IHT changes on pensions, the Bank of Mum and Dad is handing out large gifts earlier, giving young buyers serious firepower to get on the ladder or trade up.
Yet supply is still outpacing this new demand. The result? Entry-level prices face downward pressure in many spots. But those with big family gifts can suddenly stretch to bigger homes and better areas, creating a brutally two-tier market: the affluent first-timers with inherited advantage versus the rest scraping by on their own.
This won’t reshape mortgage products or neuter the Bank of England’s base rate power – that’s ruled by swap rates and macro forces, not family cheques

We are already seeing a clear acceleration in wealthy parents and grandparents gifting money during their lifetime, and the decision to drag unused pensions into the inheritance tax net from April 2027 has poured fuel on the fire.

For years, pensions were one of the last sensible shelters for families trying to pass on wealth efficiently. That has now changed. In some cases, where inheritance tax is applied and beneficiaries later pay income tax when drawing the inherited pension, families could face an effective tax rate of up to 67%. Unsurprisingly, many are asking why they would leave money sitting in a pension to be taxed so heavily when they could gift it earlier.

The housing market is likely to feel the impact. More parents will use lifetime gifts to help children with deposits, bigger homes or mortgage reductions. That may sound positive, but it risks creating an even more distorted property market where buyers with wealthy families can move faster, borrow less and bid more ag