Next generation mortgages

The rate of homeownership amongst young people has slumped over the past 20 years. Generation Home began life with a couple trying to understand why the mortgage market couldn’t serve them and millions like them.

After living abroad for several years, Will and Sophia returned to London in summer 2018 and tried to buy a flat. They couldn’t find a lender that provided the flexibility they needed. This led to the creation of Generation Home: a mortgage lender built by First-Time Buyers, for First-Time Buyers.

They assembled a diverse team united by a desire to make homeownership more accessible and rewarding — a team that includes a Cambridge professor (who occupies Isacc Newton’s old room) engineers, analysts, product developers and operations managers from traditional and disruptive insititutions such as BlackRock, Barclays, Bank of America, Zopa and Transfer Wise.

Generation Home read the rulebook forensically to understand where they could innovate on behalf of their customers and together we created an accessible, seamless experience from mortgage application, to offer, to door within a heavily regulated environment — break what needed to be broken and use the best of what remained.

The positioning, proposition and service experience emerged over several rounds of design and testing. Generation Home’s proposition navigates human relationships and balances aspiration with realism, innovation with reassurance. A new or experienced homeowner has to examine their attitudes to risk, their belief in their own ambition and their trust in themselves.

The brand name is the mission. The average cost of a home compared to an average salary makes it difficult for people to borrow enough. And high rents make it difficult to save for a deposit. Generations of homeowners need a brand, products and services that create ways into homeownership — the Heart/House icon sums up Generation Home’s purpose and passion.