HBOS, Yorkshire Building Society and Nationwide Building Society have agreed to join the Government’s HomeBuy scheme.

The agreement allows the lenders to go ahead with private financing of equity loans to strengthen a new range of HomeBuy schemes which will contribute towards helping an extra 20,000 households into home ownership by 2010, taking the total to more than 100,000.

The new offer has been agreed with the three building societies and will be available from October 2006 on a pilot basis for two years.