Soaring house prices are a boon - provided you already have a foot on the property ladder. But a new survey says the cost of a new home has radically outstripped salaries, leaving first-timers high and dry. Julia Breen and Dan Jenkins report.

Radiographer Emma Banham is living at home with her parents after moving back from Leeds because properties were too expensive there.

She returned to her home town of Darlington in the hope of affording a property and rented at first.

But house prices shot up in the town and were soon out of her range.

The 29-year-old earns between £20,000 and £25,000 a year, but with student debts to pay off, she says she cannot afford a mortgage on a property over £70,000.

She blames her predicament on buy-to-let landlords on shopping sprees.

"That's what happened in Leeds," she said. "All the landlords bought up the properties and priced first-time buyers out of the market."

"There is absolutely nothing in Darlington.

"I look at the property pages every week and I can't find anything.

"I did see something for £60,000 last week, but it needed a lot of work and it had gone in a day."

At the moment, Miss Banham is saving hard to pay off her debts so she can stretch to a more expensive mortgage.

But, until then, her dream of owning her own home seems a long way off.

Estate agent Andrew Potter, director of JW Wood, in Darlington, said: "This is not a new predicament. In the 1990s, interest rates were at 15 per cent, so affordability was the same as it is now.

"It's always been a strain for first-time buyers. I struggled with my first property because of the interest rates and it was a £32,000 flat."

Financial advisor Colin Henderson said that mortgage lenders were offering 30 or even 40-year mortgages, or allowing buyers to borrow more to buy their homes.

They are even lending more than the property value to help first-time buyers pay off car or student debts in a lump sum, meaning they are better able to afford mortgage payments.

But he said: "The danger of this is that a loan you could pay off in a year in fact takes you 20 years."

Simon Wright, partner at Robinsons Estate Agents, said that house prices were coming down slightly this year.

"I would say to first-time buyers that they might think they cannot afford a property, but the prices are coming down a bit now and they should take another look," he said.

The lack of affordable properties is placing a huge strain on other schemes, such as shared equity, where families buy part of a home from a housing association and rent the rest.

But over the next two years, the Government has only earmarked £82m for such schemes in the region, compared to the £500m that will be pumped into London.

Pete Ottowell, operations director at Three Rivers Housing, in Durham, said: "The proportion of funding coming into the North-East is relatively small.

"We try to spread the jam as far as we can, but the new investment is not enough."

He said soaring house prices had seen the turnover of tenants in rented properties halve, as less families moved on to buying their own homes.

"This means that, at the same time demand is increasing, there is less availability," he said.

In the Yorkshire Dales National Park, the average house price has been pushed up to more than £235,000, as more and more properties are snapped up as holiday homes.

This has priced most people born in the Dales out of the market.

This week, the park authority approved new regulations that prevent buyers from outside the area purchasing houses in the dales, in a bid to solve the problem.

Peter Stockton, the authority's strategic planning officer, said: "This will help us build up a small stock of housing in the national park that can only be used by people already living or working in the area.

"This will help fill the gap between social housing and the bottom of the present housing market.