With the average price paid by first-time buyers now more than £150,000, few young people can rely on their salary alone to get a foot on the housing ladder. For most, the only way of squaring the circle is by extracting cash from long-suffering parents or signing up for one of the growing number of shared-ownership schemes.

Not Joshua Jackson, 22. He is having an online whip-round instead. The boarding-school-educated graduate of Brunel University, London, has set up a website, Fingerscrossed property.blogspot.com, on which he is urging people to send him contributions to buy a home.

His aim is to raise £280,000 — enough, he believes, to acquire a two-bed house in Battersea, southwest London. “It sounds ridiculous, and I am expecting most people to shun the idea,” says Jackson, who rents a comfortable home with two friends in Belsize Park, in the northwest of the capital. “But all I’m asking is for people to donate whatever they can afford, whether it is £1 or £100, until I’ve got enough to buy a house.”

Concerned not to be labelled a lazy money-grabber, Jackson, who is currently “taking a break from employment”, has added a sweetener to the deal: he says he will give the most generous benefactor the money he earns from renting out the second bedroom for a year. He reckons that should come to about £5,400.

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• Pester power

Jackson is not alone in trying his luck on the internet. Others are doing the same, partly inspired by the example of Alex Tew, a 21-year-old from Wiltshire, who hit the headlines 18 months ago when he raised $1m by selling $1 advertising slots, pixel by pixel, on his website, the Million Dollar Homepage.

In the past few months, two almost-identical rival websites have sprung up applying the same concept to saving money for a house.

The first, Buymeahouse.com, was launched by Bippon Kalia, 33, who rents with his wife, Lisa, and their three-year-old son, Aryan, in Hounslow, west London. “If I work day in, day out, I might just about be able to afford a house by the time I’m 45,” says Kalia, who runs a home-security business. “I’m not prepared to be part of that rat race.”

Instead, he has come up with what he calls a “multipronged” approach to funding his first property. As well as the website, he plans to help pensioners convert their homes into flats and take a cut of the profits they get from renting out the extra units.

Bizarrely, Kalia has also registered a company called Sky Banners, to sell advertising space on the roof of the house he rents, which lies on Heathrow’s flight path. “Airport billboards make a packet. I can hang a sheet on my roof and make some money out of all those thousands of people flying over it every day.” His total takings so far: £2,000-£3,000.

Not inclined to fund Kalia, either? Then what about Terry Turner, 23, who has set up a rival site, Buymeahouseinstead.com. Turner, who still lives with his parents in Essex and shares a bedroom with his younger brother, is also selling advertising space on his site and claims to have raised more than £2,000 so far.

“Every pixel I sell is a brick towards my new home,” he says. In return, he is offering to beam the logo of the company that buys the most online bricks onto the front of his new home with a cinema projector. “My family thinks I’m mad,” he laughs. “And there might be a few angry people at the local council, but arguments are good — they bring publicity.”

Such schemes are, in part, little more than a high-tech version of the requests for financial assistance that have long featured in Private Eye, the satirical magazine. Yet they also symbolise the growing desperation of people trying to buy their first home, highlighted by figures released last week by the Department for Communities and Local Government. These show the average price paid by a first-time buyer reached a new high of £156,031 in February — up from £141,233 a year ago. The age at which people make their first property purchase, meanwhile, continues to rise. The average age of the first-time buyer is now 33, according to Halifax.

“Anecdotally, we have noticed that, as house prices increase, first-time buyers are becoming increasingly creative in their attempts to step onto the property ladder,” says Phil Jenks, the head of mortgages at the bank. “In reality, if you’re looking to buy your first home, you should try and put some savings aside and seek appropriate advice. There are other options available.”

For those determined to pay their own way, the only solution is to take out a bigger mortgage: some companies are now prepared to offer as much as 125% of the property’s value.

Sarah Warwick, 25, a magazine editor, who lives in Ealing, west London, is trying to buy a house with a friend. She plans to take out a mortgage of nearly 100%. She realises the dangers of getting into such debt, but says she has little choice. “There’s a feeling of panic among the people you talk to about it — suddenly, everyone wants to get on the ladder before we get totally priced out,” she says. “It doesn’t seem to matter that we can’t really afford what we’re buying, in the way our parents would have thought about it. Actual money doesn’t seem to come into it any more.”

Yet about 17,000 properties in Britain were repossessed last year — up 65% from 2005. This figure looks set to rise, if, as expected, the Bank of England increases interest rates again, pushing up mortgage bills.

With this in mind, perhaps setting up an online begging bowl isn’t such a bad idea, after all.

Facing the facts for first-time buyers

- The average house price rose to £194,400 last month, according to Halifax — more than eight times national average earnings

- In February, the number of loans to first-time buyers dropped to its lowest level for two years, says the Council of Mortgage Lenders. First-time buyers borrowed on average a record high of 3.31 times income

- Many first-time buyers are looking abroad to get on the property ladder. Conti Financial Services, an overseas mortgage specialist, says inquiries are on the rise in eastern Europe, Turkey and northern France

- Key workers (nurses, teachers, firemen) cannot afford to buy their own home in 70% of UK towns and cities, according to Halifax

- In a battle for their business, CoOp Bank is offering 1% cashback with a mortgage to first-time buyers

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