How Generation Home is revolutionising the market for first-time buyers

Will Rice and Sophia Guy-White created their company not out of altruism but the frustration that it is so hard to get on the property ladder, writes Heather Martin

Will and Sophia’s start-up aims to make (property) dreams come true (Generation Home)

Everyone wants a dream home. But nearly everyone needs a hefty mortgage to pay for it. So what happens when you struggle to pay for the mortgage on your own? If you’re lucky, you can have a whip-round among your relatives. Or, like Will Rice and Sophia Guy-White, you can come up with your own dynamic mortgage platform that accommodates a whole bunch of different ways of sticking a mortgage together.

Will and Sophia first met in London. She grew up in Connecticut and had studied Russian at Columbia in New York. Will hails from Putney. He read Russian and Arabic at Cambridge and wooed Sophia with quotes from Pushkin. It wasn’t long before they found themselves in Moscow, for a five-year period topped and tailed by the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and the 2018 World Cup. While Sophia worked for the Moscow Times, covering the Crimean crisis and the ongoing conflict with Ukraine, Will was running public market investments for the chairman of Aeroflot, one-time deputy chief of staff to Putin in the St Petersburg administration of the 1990s.

But when they returned to London in their late twenties they came down to earth with a bump. They had been renting for 10 years and had nothing to show for it. They tried buying a house with friends, as you might rent one, and discovered they couldn’t make it work. Which is when Generation Home was born. In early 2020, just before Covid kicked in, they moved into an office on Exmouth Market. At that point they employed twenty people. Now they employ almost 100, have leased a second floor, raised £30m in equity funding, and expect to “at least double” over the course of this year.