Richard Sexton said that the Chancellor did very little to cure the paralysis at the bottom end of the market even though fiscal austerity gave Osborne a golden chance to inject investment into the property market.
He said: “This section of the property market needs help - just 11% of all loans for house purchase last month were to buyers with a deposit of under 15%.
“It is clear more needs to be done to turn the trickle of first-time buyer loans into a healthy flow. But the Chancellor let the opportunity sail by.”
Sexton added that increasing stamp duty on the properties of the super rich was scant consolation to first-time buyers stuck in the rental market.
He said: “They wanted to see details of how the government would encourage embattled lenders to lend more to poorer buyers. Current government aid doesn’t go far enough.
“The NewBuy scheme lacks the scale and the imagination to make much of a dent into the backlogged pool of first-time buyers who have been displaced into the rental market.”
President of the National Association of Estate Agents, Wendy Evans-Scott, said the Budget was proving to be a double whammy for first-time buyers.
She said: “Not only has the Chancellor failed to offer any real help to lower and middle income homeowners and first-time buyers but from Saturday the stamp duty holiday for first-time buyers will be coming to an end.
“Property is already over-taxed in the UK compared to other OECD countries and instead of using the Budget as an opportunity for whole-scale reform of property taxation, the Chancellor has chosen to further tax property sales with the introduction of a 7% rate at the upper end of the market.
“The Budget was a chance for George Osborne to support the green shoots of recovery but there is actually very little in today’s announcement to support the UK’s fragile property market.”
Evans-Scott added that to get the market moving again, homeowners across the whole market needed the confidence to sell their homes and first-time buyers needed encouragement to climb onto the property ladder.
She said: “Today’s Budget provided neither.
“The Chancellor left the unfair “slab” structure of Stamp Duty untouched, despite a strong case for reform. Stamp Duty distorts the housing market and hits first-time buyers the hardest. It is a tax on aspiration.”
Helen Adams, managing director of first-time buyer web-site FirstRungNow said: "We are extremely disappointed that the chancellor has not said that he will continue with the stamp duty holiday for first home buyers.
"Since it was introduced this was the only concession purely for first-time buyers that benefited buyers and sellers of all types of first time properties. The main government schemes remaining, NewBuy and FirstBuy benefit first and foremost the house-builders, and provide no stimulus for the remainder of the market, namely those not buying or selling new-build homes.
"We will continue with our on-line petition to ban stamp duty for first timers – whilst the house-builders can afford to offer the paying of this tax as an incentive from their profit, that’s not an option for other sellers."
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