My girlfriend and I are currently in the process of buying a house.
The property is a new build, £285,000. We're using the help to buy scheme, which means we have a deposit of 5% of the total price, £14,250. The help to buy scheme enables us to have a deposit of 4.5 our combined salaries, £211,500, and the government will own 20% of the equity of our property (which we can buy back at a later date), £57,000. There's then a shortfall in the deposit of about £3,000, which we will be covering. Stamp duty on that is £4,250 (I believe).
All in all, we need about £24,000.
OK, that's a fair amount of money.But we both live with our parents, these figures have to be paid over roughly a 9 month period (looking at moving in in September), but with planning in advance, we are able to pay that. We've had to ask our parents for £5,000, but this is simply because we didn't start saving early enough, not because it's an unachievable amount of money to save. Living at home, combined we save £1,800 per month. That's saving for 13 months to afford a house in Surrey. I really don't think that's too bad.