Local house prices, parental background and young adults’ homeownership in England and Wales

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE via https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098016668121 Financial constraints are thought to be making parental support an increasingly influential factor in the homeownership transitions of young Britons. This could inhibit social mobility, exacerbate the intergenerational transmission of wealth and deepen housing inequality. Although research shows that parental socio-economic advantage is associated with filial homeownership, less is known about whether these relationships are particularly pronounced in expensive housing markets where access to homeownership is often more constrained. This study tests this hypothesis by enriching the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study of England and Wales with data on local transactional house prices. Multilevel models indicate that disparities in the odds of homeownership between young adults with more and less socio-economically advantaged parents tend to deepen with increasing house prices. This pattern is most noticeable for women. However, parents and prices only intersect to greatly stratify the probability of homeownership when young adults’ circumstances are otherwise conducive to owning. This research was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Future Research Leaders award [ES/L009498/1]. Additional financial support was provided by the Isaac Newton Trust