Q I am a single 38-year-old adult living in London with no dependants. I have rented for years as I have always assumed that I would never be in a position to secure a mortgage on my salary which is currently just under £30,000. However, my family have recently been able to offer me help with a deposit – a gift, not a loan - and I am now considering my options. I have spoken with a mortgage adviser who believes I may qualify for a traditional mortgage but I have been looking at the London help-to-buy scheme and wondered if there was an advantage in applying for that, even if I have financial support.

With personal savings and family assistance I can put forward a deposit of up to £50,000, with additional money reserved for legal fees. I would – ideally – be looking for a one-bed flat in the zone two region of Southwark, but am not picky. For the purposes of work I need to be able to get to Waterloo or Clapham Junction stations fairly easily very early in the morning.

My job is as secure as any job can be and there is a small chance of an increased salary in the next year or so, taking it up to the £35,000 mark. Is help to buy a reasonable option under the circumstances and are there any particular risks or disadvantages? DW

A Sorry to pour cold water on your plans but, even with financial assistance from the London help-to-buy scheme, you would struggle to find a one-bed flat in easy reach of Clapham Junction or Waterloo that you could afford to buy – even if it wasn’t in your preferred location of Southwark. Assuming that you could get a mortgage of four times your salary, that you would get the maximum government loan of 40% under the London help-to-buy scheme and you would put the whole of your £50,000 towards a deposit, the most you could afford to pay for a flat would be about £280,000. A quick trawl of one-bedroom flats for sale in London on Rightmove suggests that – unless you are in the market for a retirement property – you would have to buy a lot further out than Southwark. The trawl also suggested that there were very few new-build help-to-buy flats in your price range. One of the downsides of help to buy – whether in London or elsewhere – is that only new-build properties qualify. Another is that when you come to sell, you have to repay the government loan and the government gets to benefit from any increase in the price of the property because they get the same percentage of the sale proceeds as the percentage of the purchase price that was the loan at the outset.

However, all is not doom and gloom. With a budget of £170,000 – so not including help-to-buy assistance – you could easily afford to buy more than the minimum share in a shared ownership property. With these, you buy a share in a property and pay rent on the share owned by the housing association and you are allowed to increase your share in a process known as “staircasing”. The other good news is that according to Rightmove, there are a lot of shared ownership flats both in Southwark and in easy reach of Waterloo and Clapham Junction.