Cash gifts! Free sofas! Celebrity interior designers to help you style up your home! House builders have long handed out great-sounding freebies to encourage buyers to take the plunge.
But with sales flagging the great giveaway bonanza has reached new heights in 2025. Buyers are being offered tens of thousands of pounds worth of handouts if they agree to buy a new home.
Cynics may suggest that the generosity of the freebies is linked to a recent collapse in sale numbers, and experts urge buyers to think carefully about whether the offers are actually a great deal or just sound good.
According to Savills, between 2013 and 2015 some 20,000 new homes changed hands each year in the capital, in a market where interest rates were rock bottom, buy to let was a highly profitable endeavour, and international buyers were keen to invest.
Last year sale numbers plunged to just 7,500, an 11 per cent decline compared to 2023, as the industry grappled with the loss of the Help to Buy scheme (in 2022) which gave buyers with small deposits and modest borrowing power the chance to get onto the ladder by way of a Government equity loan.
“As the market softens there are more offers and goodies available,” agrees Jeremy Leaf, principal of Jeremy Leaf estate agents in north west London.
“Developers need to sell so they can pay off their loans. They are prepared to be perhaps more flexible than owner occupiers — they have to be. It is a buyers’ market and they have to bend over backwards to sell.”
Most of the deals out there centre on cutting upfront costs, by contributing to buyers’ deposits or stamp duty and, certainly, it can get you onto the ladder.
Without enough savings to cover a deposit Jayson Masaya, 32, and his wife Irish, 30, both nurses, believed home ownership was out of reach — until they heard about a deposit contribution scheme on offer to key workers.
The scheme allowed them to buy at Sterling Place, a Barratt London development in New Malden, where one-bedroom flats start at £409,000 (barrattlondon.com).
They bought off plan, putting down a five per cent deposit. Barratt contributed another five per cent, and they moved in in December, having saved another five per cent while waiting for the flat to be completed.
“A real draw for us was how spread out the deposit payments are,” says Irish.
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Different developers offer different variations on the theme. At the £8bn Brent Cross Town project in north-west London, for example, developer Related Argent will pay stamp duty for incoming buyers of studios, one, two, and three-bedroom homes (up to £41,250, providing they are UK residents buying a main home).
Prices start at £420,000 (brentcrosstown.co.uk).
And Barratt has a whole range of incentives depending on your circumstances.
If you are a key worker and buy a home at Hayes Village, a reboot of the former Nestle Factory with 1,500 you’d get a £15,000 contribution towards your deposit if you buy either a £355,00,000 one-bedroom flat or a £432,500 two-bedroom flat.
If you already have a ten per cent deposit saved up, Barratt will give you another five per cent at several of its sites, upping your deposit to 15 per cent which will give you access to lower interest rates when you go mortgage shopping.
This offer is in play at Bermondsey Heights, a 26-storey tower at the heart of regeneration of the under-utilized swathe of south London around the Old Kent Road.
Prices start from £449,000 for a one-bedroom flat, which means you will need a deposit of almost £50,000 to qualify (ouch) but will get a “free” almost £25,000 in return.
If location is more important to you than size then Pocket Living’s Forest Road E17 gives you a chance to buy a small slice of real estate in fashionable Walthamstow (pocketliving.com).
Prices start at £300,000 for a one-bedroom flat measuring 453 sq ft.
First-time buyers don’t pay stamp duty on purchases of £300,000 or less, but for those buying a more expensive £325,000 property the developer will pay the £1,400 stamp duty bill.
And all buyers can book a style consultation with Banjo Beale, interior designer and winner of BBC's Interior Design Masters 2022, to advise you on colour schemes and finishes. Pocket says this assist is worth another £500.
For those considering the shared ownership route, buyers who reserve an apartment at SO Resi Wembley Way, just around the corner from the stadium, this summer will be given a five per cent deposit contribution.
Prices start at £87,000 for a 25 per cent share of a one-bedroom apartment, which means that if buyers put down a five per cent £4,350 deposit they will be gifted another £4,350 (soresi.co.uk/find-a-property/so-resi-wembley-way).
Monthly costs, including mortgage, rent, and service charge will tot up to just under £1,200pcm.
Broadly speaking the bigger your budget the more headline grabbing the freebies.
At The 1840 St George’s Gardens, the redevelopment of a Grade II listed Victorian hospital building in Tooting, The Old Dormitory, a two-bedroom duplex apartment with double height living room, a study, utility room, and two bathrooms, is on sale for £875,000.
Interested? Then the developer will pay your £33,750 stamp duty and furniture and accessories worth up to £32,291, adding up to a freebie total of just over £66,000, or some 7.5 per cent of the sale price.
But buying agent Nina Harrison, of Haringtons, advises buyers to avoid getting over excited about designer furnishings and styling, and concentrate on cash benefits.
“At high-end developments there’s often a big song and dance about bespoke interiors – everything from choosing your own marble to working with their in-house designer,” she says.
“It’s a way to make buyers feel they’re getting something truly one-of-a-kind, but rarely does it come with the kind of financial sweeteners you see in other parts of the market.”
Leaf agrees that “goodies” should be treated with caution. “Look at the bigger picture,” he says. “How does the development itself compare? Is it overpriced? What would its rental value be if plans change and you needed to move to a new area?
“There is a lot of information and misinformation out there.”
A major issue buyers of new homes need to consider is the ongoing cost of annual service charges, which can quickly wipe out any early cash advantages.
At Kew Bridge Rise, for example, you will pay £2,777pa for a one-bedroom flat and £3,756pa if you buy a two-bedroom flat, while at Hayes Village the bill for a one-bedroom flat is £2,100pa, rising to £2,465 for a two-bedroom flat. The buyer of The Old Dormitory will pay just over £4,000pa.
And some offers are so convoluted it is easy to lose sight of what you are actually saving.
At the 150-acre, £8.4m Greenwich Peninsula scheme taking shape next to the O2, developer Knight Dragon is offering a “rent to buy” scheme.
Put really, really simply you put down a five per cent deposit on a flat, move in, then spend a year leasing the property and paying monthly rent in order to amass another five per cent. Twelve months later you are free to buy the flat with your ten per cent deposit.
To use a real time example, currently for sale at Greenwich Peninsula is a one-bedroom, 564 sq ft flat, priced at £570,000.
Your initial five per cent deposit would be £28,500, and you would then pay a hefty £2,375pcm rent for a year. At the end of the year you would have £57,000 to put down and officially buy the flat.
Although the scheme does give you some breathing space to save, ultimately the only cash benefit you are getting here is that you won’t have to pay service charge or ground rent that first year. For the one-bedroom flat comes in at around £5,200. You can also claim up to £1,500 for legal costs.
And there you have your real cash saving – less than two per cent of the asking price.
How to haggle for a discount on a new build home
You might think that developer prices are fixed – but you would be wrong.
The reality is that many firms will discuss lowering the sale price as well as offering incentives to buyers.
“If it was me I would not hesitate to offer 15 per cent below the asking price,” says Marc Schneiderman, sales director at Arlington Residential.
“Saying that, if you manage to get 10 per cent off I’d say you are doing very well.”
You are more likely to get a cut price home if you are ready to buy immediately, and are able to buy off plan – because buying early means you are helping a builder with their cash flow while they are still on site.
Year end is another good time to haggle hard as firms want to hit their sale targets. Check with Companies House when your builder’s end of the financial year is.
For Harrison getting in early is the best strategy. “Developers want to secure early adopters to build momentum and create the illusion of demand,” she says.
“Once that critical mass is in place, the tone shifts. Suddenly, it’s “we’re nearly sold out” and “there are only a handful left” – and at that point, any talk of incentives disappears. The window for negotiation shuts quickly.”
And even if a developer shuts down your pleas for a discount Schneiderman suggests a Plan B.
“Sometimes developers will not negotiate on price because they don’t want it in the public domain that they are discounting,” he says.
“That would open the floodgates. But they will give very good incentives that are not necessarily advertised, like paying stamp duty or giving you a store room or a parking space.”
