House prices: Property sales hit five-year high It also estimates that the share of first-time buyers getting on the property ladder without needing any extra help from parents has increased in the last couple of years. The CML said: "We estimate that there has been a slow and steady increase in the proportion of first-time buyers buying without assistance from 32pc of all first-time buyers in 2009 to 36pc in 2012." The CML said yesterday that it expects mortgage lending to reach £156 billion this year, compared with an estimated £143 billion during 2012. The HMRC figures showed that the number of sales in 2012 was still almost half the levels seen five years earlier. However, sales picked up in the final quarter of last year to 237,000 transactions, showing a 4pc increase on the previous quarter and a 2pc increase on the same period in 2011. The CML said: "It may be easy to overlook the recovery that has already quietly been under way in the mortgage market throughout 2012. Indeed, we suspect that consumer sentiment may not yet have caught up with the extent to which the mortgage market has already improved; and some commentators still take as their benchmark the over-heated market of the mid-2000s. In a sign of the sales numbers to come, mortgage approvals to home buyers have been increasing in recent months, which analysts have put down to the introduction of a multi-billion Government scheme in August to kick-start lending. The number of mortgages on the market has been on the rise and lenders have been slashing their rates since the Funding for Lending scheme was launched. The CML also highlighted deals recently launched by lenders to give buyers a helping hand, such as Barclays' "family springboard" mortgage, which allows buyers to get on the property ladder with a 5pc deposit if their parents put 10pc of the home's value into a separate savings account. money@telegraph.co.uk