Reaching out to Britain's struggling first-time buyers are Web sites such as BuyAssent and Sharetobuy -- combining the functions of a bulletin board, dating agency and real estate agent to help strangers meet and become good enough friends to buy a home together on a group mortgage.
And next year, the furniture superstore IKEA is expected to begin selling one- and two-bedroom prefabricated homes and apartments in Britain, as it already does in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. The BoKlok homes, built by a contractor working with IKEA, are designed as affordable housing. In Sweden, a one-bedroom BoKlok apartment in a rural area sells for as little as $29,000.
"We want the single nurse with one child to be able to afford this," said Anders Larsson, chief executive for BoKlok in Sweden.
Another obstacle for first-time buyers is taxes. Britain has a 1 percent to 4 percent stamp duty that buyers must pay on homes that cost more than $114,000. The government tried to help potential buyers by offering recently to double the stamp duty threshold to 120,000 pounds.
But in London, the average house price is $491,000.
The British government is trying other initiatives aimed at helping more people become first-time buyers. Loosening its strict planning rules for constructing new homes, the government is offering surplus public land for inexpensive starter homes, and making it easier for private companies to build thousands of dwellings in areas of southern England where many people live and commute to London.
Bowley said many young professionals he knows in London, the world's most expensive city after Tokyo, remain gloomy.
"Renting is throwing money down the drain," said his roommate, Pete Edwards, 27, "and without one another we wouldn't have been able to buy so easily -- if at all."
AP writers Shawn Pogatchnik in Dublin, Christian Wienberg in Copenhagen, Eileen Alt Powell in New York, Mar Roman in Madrid and Mikael G. Holter in Paris contributed to this report.
