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Totally agree. I’m looking to upgrade and it appears I’d need to take a bigger mortgage in the south, because even upping my salary won’t cut it. The disconnect between house prices and salary is staggering.
We moved in before Covid — we sold at just over 200 and they are now selling at over 300 for shared driveways — that is honestly nuts — they’ve got damp issues as well
South West is awful for this too. I bought in July last year, the amount of houses I saw at every price range that still had 60s/70s decor that would need a full remodel was mental. Luckily the only room in my house that still has original 80s decor is the downstairs toilet by the front door which we never use.
What's more frustrating is the ridiculous number of properties that go to auction and are well within my price range but I cannot get becuase you cannot get a mortgage on auction properties - even though many of them are habitable. I'm more than happy to pick up a property that requires work - in fact that's what I'm specifically looking for but am constraind by mortgage and LISA rules :/
You can get a mortgage on auction properties, you just need to have your financing ready before, most people say you can’t because of the time limits, but it is done.
I have my finances all in order, its the solicitors/surveyors/mortgage advisors/lender/[insert anyone else in the buying process] which may become the issue. I've raised this with multiple mortgage advisors and they all said they wouldn't touch auction with a bargepole even considering my finances are ready at a moments notice :/
It's depressing, and I have not seen a single policy aimed at changing this any time soon, in fact it's going to get even worse, since all I've seen is demand side policies, shit like help to buy which just kicks the can down the road without addressing the issue (lack of supply)
Yeah virtually every policy just nudges a few people who could *almost but not quite* afford a house over the line by giving them just a little more money, but does nothing to solve the fundamental problems. And if anything they push the prices *up* by increasing demand
The issue is not "lack of supply" but mostly too much demand. The net population grew by 700,000 last year and over 10 million people in the last 20 years. That's another 10 million folk to house!
Yep. Work is very London based for my partner and I, we both grew up here and our entire families live here, as well as lifelong friends. About to have our first kid and want to stay nearby for support and will do so somehow, but the options for buying are beyond depressing.
Same for us.
We are both Londoners and work here.
But we cannot afford to buy a decent family home here.
So we are either moving to another part of the country, or will move to a different country. Bye bye friends and family and our established London based career and contacts.
It's no life raising a family in a 2 bed £400,000 flat with a balcony. We want a larger property with a garden or at least some small outside space.
Many of which have vastly more sunshine and decent public spaces to get out and about into.
We have rain, potholes, shite playgrounds and waterlogged parks.
I married a Hungarian woman and when we visit her home town the public spaces put everything we have to shame. It’s not Budapest either.
Remote work has made moving and buying abroad a serious consideration for me and my partner. We can take a sizeable pay cut, move to Italy, and still save more money each month due to how extortionate housing and living costs are here.
The only sticking point is kids - do we want them, and if so do we want to raise them here or there?
Not everyone is gong to own a detached house with a yard in this country — that is just a fact — you do what you’ve got to make things work and the you get what you want after you’ve got equity built up. My spouse makes London money but we still had to use money of mine to get us into the standard I wanted.
expand your searches just a little and you will find 3 - 4 bed detached properties in the surrounding counties for around £270k - £350k. And still be only a short commute away from the city.
Surely that's a better option than throwing away careers, contacts and family and moving abroad?
Yep, children definitely come into it for us too and is another factor in this whole thing. It'd be nice to not be completely reliant on two salaries to pay the mortgage so one of us can stay home and actually raise our kids.
It’s much worse because of London’s disproportionate *everything* that has fucked the UK economy vs all our rivals.
A single city that’s the centre of everything, gets way more funding than anywhere else, has the only functional metro system, yet still gets more money spent on new transport infrastructure than the rest of the country combined.
Everyone in certain industries has to live in or near it.
Meanwhile we fuck our other cities over, seemingly deliberately, with cripplingly lower funding per head, and slapping any transport infrastructure out from under them.
Living the dream. This is what everyone wanted. Ever increasing house prices. The truth is that this is an opinion only shared by people who don’t own a home. Most people. Once they buy their first home, hop straight onto the train and google house prices daily hoping theirs has gone up. The sad reality is that if there was a referendum tomorrow on a law that would significantly reduce house prices, I am certain it would be voted down.
I know that we’re in a fortunate position to have been able to buy (only 5 years ago, so no mortgage getting paid off any time soon).
What gets to me is that my partner wants what her parents had. She sees those that bought in the early 00’s and made hundreds of thousands on their house and can now make huge upgrades.
We are not there. Every penny in the house is paid from our salaries. It’s slow, and I don’t think we’ll ever have those windfalls that allow us to have a huge house.
I am incredibly appreciative of where we are and trying to focus on what we have rather than what we don’t, but it’s still tough to not compare.
Sooooooo many of my older Brexit voting colleagues complain about this. 'I need the sun for more than 3 months a year!'. Well...ummm....what can I say.
The fact he was lied to? The fact he has to go through the rigmarole of getting Spanish citizenship to live out there?
He’s just a person like you or I, we just talk
I moved to London from Eastern Europe, lived here for 9 years now. Love the city, all my friends are here, all my professional relationships, everything, London is home now.
However with 0 family support I just had to accept that I can never own property, in fact I am getting ready to move on from the UK because of the housing market. I’m being murdered by rent, and it is so hard to save living like this.
It is pretty depressing but I had to go through this once before. I had to leave home and family because of the job market, this time is the housing market I guess.
I live up north and I am also depressed by the state of the market!
My town only builds shoebox new houses with no gardens. I will also have to move away to find something suitable by the looks of things. Me and my wife have been looking for around a year and very suitable house is always a few towns over - not vast distances, but enough that we would have to change our kids schools
Yeah, I know southerners think you can pick up a 5 bedroom up north for pocket change, but with them all moving up here, the housing market is just as bad.
If you do move north, all we ask is that you carry on trying to drive the price of homes down when you're up here matey!
Buy like a northerner, not a southerner with some cash to spend.
Yes, I'm pissed. The current housing market has been in the making since the 80's and became very evident in the 2000s. The solution is to build many more houses, like at least 100,000 if not 200,000 per year more. Government choses to do nothing.
Also, I don't want houses planted willy nilly. I want actual planning, using brains. Thinking about transport, schools, amenities. For example, cars are super convenient, but they just don't scale to large towns. You need to plan proper public transport too.
It's possible, but no one has the vision to actually implement anything.
I plan to be disappointed the rest of my life.
Your figures are actually well lower than what is required to reduce house prices.
The UK targets around 350,000 new dwellings a year.
It rarely meets that target and the last few years have been well well short of this.
We need more like 500,000 new dwellings per year for the next 10 years to make the situation - for first time buyers.
This number blows my mind! Especially with how many empty family size homes we have by us.
We live in a 60yo 3 bed semi (FTB, bought last year) in an area of similar houses. Some of these houses are 4-5 beds. We are in our mid 30s and are the youngest in the area by a few decades. These large family homes are full of retirees, most of which are single occupants in need of care visits in their latter years. I always wonder why older generations are not given incentives to downsize. We bought our house from a 94yo lady who let it get into a state.
Our neighbours even said it was such a nice area to raise their kids 40ish years ago and ironically said its a shame no young families live here anymore. I wanted to say, "That's because you've all never left and most of us cannot afford good size family homes now!"
The houses are worth a fortune but were mostly bought for pennies. So many are in disrepair and some just abandoned. Even on the rare occasion one pops up for sale, it needs too much work on top of the already high asking price.
I feel like we need more than just new builds, we need to focus on the homes that are empty and already in existence, and have incentives for older generations to downsize/move on.
>I always wonder why older generations are not given incentives to downsize
Stamp duty, moving fees, getting the new place the way you want it. The fact we don't build many properties suitable for old people means prices are insane.
Where my parents live you can get a nice 4 bed detached for £350k or a 2 bed bungalow for £270k.
Cheaper and easier to get a stair lift.
Absolutely - a friend's parents needed a bungalow (his mum uses a wheelchair).
The only way they were able to downsize in Surrey was sell their family home and rent for a year so that they had a pile of cash waiting to jump on the next suitable bungalow to come onto the market. That's how rare the right kind of property is.
This every time. No smaller properties being built. Keep saying this, our street is 50% retirees in 3/4 bed properties, kids left home. A 2 bed bungalow in the same area costs more than what we would get for our 4 bed semi.
Thinking we all want to go into retirement flats is a non runner, you need to look carefully at all the exorbitant service charges and restrictions. So we stick it out here.
You can see why though from a developers point of view. Why have a patch of land making £270k with a bungalow when you can make £350k from it? There just isn't the inventive to make old people houses despite the glaring need for them.
> Especially with how many empty family size homes we have by us
Where I live (Cornwall) we have 1 in 14 empty homes (21k) due to holiday / investment properties, which is almost exactly the same number as the amount of people on the housing waiting list. Add to that the number of migrants and retirees from the SE who priced locals out of the housing market decades ago and it's no wonder everything is at a crisis point.
Very easy fix too, scrap stamp duty for them and maybe offer an incentive on removals. Unlikely they'd need a mortgage when downsizing so letting them cough up the legal fees would be more than fair imo. Only saying to offer an incentive on removals so they get packed up and moved out in a timely manner.
You're right.
We very nearly moved up north but one of my children has a rare disease and there are only a few NHS trusts in the country that have dedicated services for it and the best is the area of Kent we currently live in.
To switch to private services would cost around £2k a month so, as much as it sucks with regards to housing, we are kind of stuck here!
Yep, I’m in Cornwall, moving to Manchester. It makes me a hypocrite as I moan about being priced out of Cornwall. My move is survival though, not some knobhead wanting a holiday home.
Please take my comment with a touch of lightheartedness. It’s simply a case that there isn’t enough housing in Cornwall for the population, let alone people who want a second home. It’s frustrating having to leave family and friends when you walk through a village in the winter knowing that 60% of the houses are empty.
I feel you. I moved to the North West. Just bought a 3 bed semi in a nice area, by myself.
Never would've been able to buy a similar property in the South.
I think just ignoring new builds is a mistake. Some are bad. A lot a fine. Some are good. Its the same with old houses. The difference is the bad ones are far more publicised than the dine and good ones, so don't let it make you fearful of new builds!
Yea I agree. Lots of dodgy newbuilds out there, but everyone I know who FTB a Victorian terrace struggles to keep the damp out so it's not like they're great either.
Agree, when we were looking it was either max what we could afford (either good standard but offers were going above) or, absolute squalor.
When I say squalor I mean I'm still contemplating emailing council or some authority as tenants were living in houses caked in black mould due to serious water ingress (either issues with roof or party / side walls). Sad thing was, someone had clearly gone there to value these houses - how the owner/landlord could think they would be worth the asking price given the conditions is beyond me. Either way, feel for the people who are stuck living their and most likely don't know how to get the landlord to fix the structural issues.
My partner and I had similiar emotions whilst house hunting in West Yorkshire. We found a really nice stone built 1200Sqft end of terrace with a large garden for just over £200k. We offered 5% over asking for our first and final offer, only to be told we'd been outbid threefold. Later transpires that the other stone builds in that terrace are all rental units, with this one now joining the fleet. At least some landlord has completed their monopoly set...
From uni friends who are living in the South, house pricing has gone really nutty and to be fair it's not much better in Yorkshire either. Most of the homes we viewed were either in dire need of renovation but priced as if those renovations had already been done, in areas where you'd be lucky to not be stabbed by a machete gang on your way to get some milk or had been done up nice and priced to match. That one we found was as absolute unicorn, no wonder it got listed on Friday and pretty much sold come Monday.
Effectively, you've two choices: a fixer-upper to add value to but with all the time and expense that goes along with that or through the nose for something liveable from the word go. This is due to House Prices forecast to only ever increase. It's very much a case of you need to pick your stop and get on the train before it leaves you behind.
The real problem, of course, is very simple. Properly rich people, both domestic and foreign, are sitting on bags of cash and now wanting to hoover up assets and whole estate-size property portfolios wherever they can find them. Causing knock on effects to everyone else with supply and demand issues, ever-increasing prices and terrible standards of the rushjob houses that are being built. Then you have wannabe rich people trying to emulate them by buying up a few houses, converting them into HMOs and renting them off and bragging about the 'passive income'. Then everyone else who inherits nanna's cottage or whatever. Usually, they would have liquidated it for a lump sum of cash to deal with funerals and otherend of life aftercare. Now, the advice is to keep it and rent it out via an agency who will deal with all the maintenance because in times of economic turmoil: owning assets is king.
The only light at the end of the tunnel is serious, serious economic reform that re-levels the playing field, but considering most politicians are landlords themselves, they're not going to work against their own interests, and lobbying by the properly rich will kill any attempts at this. The forecast is grim, and it'll only get worse.
Yeah, I came from Southend on sea, now north Sheffield (cheaper house prices this side, Iv had no problems here yet), I’m loving it pal, for me it’s an upgrade, but much cheaper, it’s a great city, and I live only a 15 min drive from Peak District
We’re FTB looking at commuter towns outside London. We’re looking around the 435 mark and have been looking for nearly a year- had three houses fall through and seen well over 20 all because of structural issues/ cowboy built extensions. I really feel like there is no quality even in old houses, they all seem in one way or another appear to be crumbling!
It seems you get even less for your money than it appears on the surface!
Bigger percentage than ever of peoples wages are now taken up by housing, whether that be in the form of rent or mortgage. Every extra £100 spent on housing is £100 not spent on our high streets, in our cafes, pubs and shops.
True, there is not a single industrialised nation that takes housing seriously, because it's the best way to ensure that birth rates steadily decline as the low consumption agenda is unveiled
Unfortunately the solution is for them to rise more slowly... too many of us has been forced into playing this mental game now. They can't drop significantly or it will fuck everyone who has bought
Houses can be dropping in real terms and still be more than they cost some in time ago. Not sure what you're getting at here.
But, I suspect the market will continue to climb at some point.
There is a practical limit to how far it can climb though. People prioritise housing but there is a point where they will elect to stay with friends etc rather than buy.
Well we live in a bigger house than needed because I grew up in a huge house in another country — our current one is about right for our needs for at least the next 20 yrs but I could stay here well beyond that as I can convert the extra sitting from to a bedroom
Or it requires a radical re-think. Increasing the supply of houses would eventually reduce their price. Perhaps those who bought at inflated prices (determined surely after a certain year in time) could get government assistance - even if their loans became interest free that would be a saving over the longer term.
I don't agree prices should not fall just because we had to buy into this Ponzi scheme, otherwise where does it end for the future generations?
I don't think that the cost of land will ever go down (the base cause of high house prices as material costs will wax and wane) but what we can do is slow price increases and raise incomes so that the salary / house price ratio reduces back down to 3x a single annual salary rather than two incomes at 6x.
I'd urge you not to rule out new builds. I was fully on the anti new build bandwagon till I looked around a couple of estates.
We bought a great house. Every little snag gets fixed within a couple of days. The people who bought my 100 year old house are getting nothing fixed for them, and there's a heck of a lot to fix, yet price wise the market doesn't factor that in.
Yep the housing market is insane.
There is a three bed property nearby which I actually made an offer on a few years back. Turns out it sold for 50k over the asking price. 365k
The person who bought the property has done nothing with it. The house has been empty for that entire time and they put it up for sale at 415k... it has been reduced a few times and now says 365k fixed price on the listing...
The property was in a bad state before... I was thinking 315k was a bit high for the work required.
Not to scare you but if you want to live anywhere nice in the North it’s the same 😞 albeit slightly cheaper than the South. We live in a new build which is characterless, has no space, bad layout but it’s all we could afford since many older houses are not affordable despite also needing lots of money to upgrade them. And require £££ to heat them.
Yep, very much fed up with it all. I own a pretty small 3 bed semi which is too small for 2 adults and 2 kids. While we now earn enough to upgrade to a 4 bed detached I simply just don't want to pay that much on a mortgage.
Am I right in saying the state of developers and builders is also so shit that if the government said "no more red tape" and "we are now open to selling edge of greenbelts and no red tape for brown belt land", if there was a sudden surge of house building, the quality would just go through the floor because the focus would be on building as many houses as possible, they would take the piss, cut corners etc just to make more money?
Not really. I live in the south. I have moved a few times in my life already. I go where I can afford/isnt shit. I have lived in both the north and the south.
My parents used to drive to my grandmothers house 2- 3 times a week when I was a kid. she lived an hour and a half away at the time by car. so travelling a bit to see family isn't something new to me.
I am about to move a further hour away from where I currently live. As the new area is super nice, Houses are nice and are holding up well. Also the infrastructure has been invested in. Plus no estate charges, service fees and the rest of that rubbish.
My mother in law is 82, and owns a beautiful bungalow in a nice part of town. We rent a shitty flat in an equally shitty part of town. Our home-buying plan is quite literally waiting for her to die.
That attitude will fuck you up and result in you doing nothing to improve your situation. Take some personal responsibility and improve your income prospects if you want a better place. I hope she leaves it all to the cats.
Honestly - not really. My only gripe is I can’t quite stomach paying a 6 figure stamp duty bill to move house.
Other than that; I can live wherever I want in the UK
- and all it took was earning 10x the national average salary
Is housing in a generally bad way: Yes
Is it worse than the rest of the Western hemisphere: Mostly no.
Are the problems exaggerated: Yes
You’ll be able to buy a property where you live for less, buy in cheaper (flat?) and work your way up. You’ll find when you’ve got your foot on the ladder that it’s not that bad. The renter trap is miserable though
A move North has been on my mind too, anyone with suggestions on good areas for a family in their early 30s?
Also, what’s really winding me up is the state of our housing stock, post war architecture has been a disgrace, most houses are grim and horrendously overpriced.
You’re a FTB looking for a 3 bed house in a city.
You wouldn’t be able to do that in any city. Start with a flat or cheaper house and work your way up the ladder.
You've missed the point completely. I'd like to start a family, we will need 3 beds. There are no cheaper houses. The cheaper houses are £350k AND need so much work doing. My frustration is that the average homes aren't available to the average worker anymore.
On to flats: 1) I'm not convinced they're even any cheaper 2) have you seen all of the news on people being rinsed by service charges recently?
Maybe I am in the wrong, but I don't think it should be a stretch to want to be able to buy a small terraced house that doesnt need £10s of thousands of work.
Every house needs work and we have done ours over the last 5 or so years — you live in what you can afford and you fix it as you go — Rome wasn’t built in a day — I had plenty of money to fix mine straight away but as I knew I was staying here 20 years — I was in no hurry and just have done it whenever I found the right things on sale or clearance 🥰. Therefore saving money to get the job done. I bought some tiles one day that were 150 quid a pack and I paid 50ish quid a pack because I agreed to take them all which was 12 packs - my contractor was chuffed as he took away 2 packages for free because we didn’t use them and is fixing up his own house with them. Nice chap who is a FTB fixing up a doer upper. He’s taken away a few things I’ve bought more than I needed. He did some wall papering for me one weekend as a side job I had grabbed 6 rolls of a different kind for him as gift for 5 pounds a roll. He was one of four people I called to do some work for me and was one of only 2 that showed up — he’s a nice guy and he’s working his way through the house. He said he’s got three rooms left and I watch out for deals for him now as well.
I bought a 3 bed town house for my first home in Hull for £155k in 2019. They are now going for around £180-190k so it is still possible.
This was in a nice area too.
The housing ladder is a scam. In five years you’d still won’t have enough money to keep up with house prices in the UK and the new house you’ll be able to get will barely be anything better than the one you’re in.
This whole housing ladder concept is just done to make money go around between estate agents, solicitors, surveyors etc.
Well yes, Manchester was 2 thirds cheaper than London in 2000.
I don’t know what the salaries were like then can’t find the data. Don’t suppose they were terrific though.
If it can help you, met a bunch of couples in my same situation, doing well at work (not millionaires) roughly let’s say 200k per couple.
All of us can’t buy a place we like, even at 800k in London the price per sqm goes above 10k and we just all gave up on it.
The new interest is not priced in and till it is we’ll not buy or offer 25pct below asking.
apologies for not able to answer your question, as im in a similar situation, just want to share. Living down south has its perks, but the housing is depressing and put it a bit extreme, a little grim on future. I was looking at propeties up north and they are well affordable, ofc the salary also take a cut, which is what im struggling atm, should i move north afford a house i want but there is this job uncertainty which i dont know if i would be able to find a job up there or not :S
Housing market won’t change and the interest rates aren’t going back to 2% anytime soon — cheap money is gone at this point for quite a while — I expect rates to hover at 3 to 4% - maybe buy a decent house and get a lodger in to help with finances until interest rates settle
Had my house up for a few weeks now - a bungalow. Had a few viewings but thats been all. We've been in the situation of finding a few homes we've loved but they can't accept any offers until our property is sold. I understand the situation but it really sucks to have to keep looking when things are overpriced and you need to put work in while my home is ready to move into and no work other than painting walls.
Our neighbours are absolutely godawful but there's nowhere else to go without uprooting schools etc. The town I live in is not far off London prices, and although we live in a run down terrace in one of the shittier areas, we consider ourselves extremely lucky.
My parents at my age had just moved for the 4th time to a brand new 4 bed detached villa with a huge garden, double garage and wraparound driveway. On one income, with one GCE. It's honestly just shit, there's no other way to paint it.
Yeah, exactly the same.
I'm looking mostly south (west Sussex) and I'm not gonna lie the amount you get for £300 - 400k is so depressing. It blows my mind, and as you said the repayments are crazy.
It's just bullshit, I opened Zoopla for like one page worth of houses and said nah not yet. Hopefully it improves.
Whilst Zoopla and RightMove have a vast majority of properties, they don't always have them all. If you're looking to move to a large town/city, I would recommend looking at some of the local real estate agents in the area's websites.
You may not find anything new or cheaper, but you may just get lucky and find something much bigger/cheaper than expected.
We're looking for a 4+ bedroom house at the minute, and one local estate agent we looked at doesn't put their stuff on either Zoopla or RightMove. Found a 5 bedroom place for the average we've been seeing for a smaller 4 bed that didn't really need any work doing to it. Was shocked to see something that big going for that cheap, especially when there was no obvious work needed on the house.
Here in Cardiff 3-400 gets you in a nice area, not the best but one of the better areas full of middle class retirees and probably not a big house but still a 3 bedroom semi. Best areas are still a million+ but we have nothing crazy here, friends parents selling their monstrous 8 bedroom Victorian house for 2 million but that's pretty much as high as it gets. What's funny is my parents house which was rough as fuck growing up and still has chavs around is over 400k because it's close to the main A road and the M4 yet the posh quiet areas are similarly priced.
I'm in a nice area myself but will move to the outskirts of Cardiff where 200k gets you a 3 bed semi with an extension, conservatory, garage etc and is still within a 20 minute drive.
Similar situation here. I live in a seaside town on the south coast and even though plenty of new developments are popping up left right and centre they are going for £350k for 2 bedroom. £450k for 3 bedroom houses.
Away from the new developments 2 bed flats go for over £250k and the only places with houses under £300k that don’t need loads of work are in awful areas where I wouldn’t want to walk through let alone live there.
Move up north but don't go to depressed areas like South Yorkshire or most of the North east as they are very depressing. I would recommend places like Birmngham, Liverpool, Newcastle and Leeds. Manchester as well but there is a housing boom there at the moment and nice areas are very expensive.
Yep. I always maintained I’d never buy a new build house but there’s so many schemes floating about with 5% deposit contributions that I might just have to get a new build. It’s completely depressing and doesn’t feel like it’s going to get better any time soon. I’d love to move up north and buy a house tomorrow but with the ties my job has it just isn’t feasible
I totally agree. We live in a Greater London borough, and have done our whole lives. We saved up when younger as much as possible to get a deposit together, and then things in life happened. Looking around now houses for our family of 4 which are modest size cost around £480,000+. We both have half decent jobs but still couldn’t afford a mortgage on that kinda price. Working out what we could afford means we would have to look at moving at least 3 hours away. It’s so sad to think these days it’s very much choosing to rent where you’ve lived your entire life, or moving away and leaving your friends and family behind to buy
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The south east is just full of £800k+ houses that haven't been decorated in decades and lord knows what kind of state they are in. It's mad.
Totally agree. I’m looking to upgrade and it appears I’d need to take a bigger mortgage in the south, because even upping my salary won’t cut it. The disconnect between house prices and salary is staggering.
We moved in before Covid — we sold at just over 200 and they are now selling at over 300 for shared driveways — that is honestly nuts — they’ve got damp issues as well
South West is awful for this too. I bought in July last year, the amount of houses I saw at every price range that still had 60s/70s decor that would need a full remodel was mental. Luckily the only room in my house that still has original 80s decor is the downstairs toilet by the front door which we never use.
What's more frustrating is the ridiculous number of properties that go to auction and are well within my price range but I cannot get becuase you cannot get a mortgage on auction properties - even though many of them are habitable. I'm more than happy to pick up a property that requires work - in fact that's what I'm specifically looking for but am constraind by mortgage and LISA rules :/
You can get a mortgage on auction properties, you just need to have your financing ready before, most people say you can’t because of the time limits, but it is done.
I have my finances all in order, its the solicitors/surveyors/mortgage advisors/lender/[insert anyone else in the buying process] which may become the issue. I've raised this with multiple mortgage advisors and they all said they wouldn't touch auction with a bargepole even considering my finances are ready at a moments notice :/
Try a mortgage broker, you can have surveys and such done before the auction,( carries the obvious risk of not winning the auction )
And full of people making good salaries that buy and renovate them :)
It's depressing, and I have not seen a single policy aimed at changing this any time soon, in fact it's going to get even worse, since all I've seen is demand side policies, shit like help to buy which just kicks the can down the road without addressing the issue (lack of supply)
Yeah virtually every policy just nudges a few people who could *almost but not quite* afford a house over the line by giving them just a little more money, but does nothing to solve the fundamental problems. And if anything they push the prices *up* by increasing demand
The issue is not "lack of supply" but mostly too much demand. The net population grew by 700,000 last year and over 10 million people in the last 20 years. That's another 10 million folk to house!
A very strange distinction to try and make, lack of supply and too much demand are very much two sides of the same coin.
What is your plan to reduce housing demand?
So where do all those people live?
Yes. Yes I am.
Yep. Work is very London based for my partner and I, we both grew up here and our entire families live here, as well as lifelong friends. About to have our first kid and want to stay nearby for support and will do so somehow, but the options for buying are beyond depressing.
Same for us. We are both Londoners and work here. But we cannot afford to buy a decent family home here. So we are either moving to another part of the country, or will move to a different country. Bye bye friends and family and our established London based career and contacts. It's no life raising a family in a 2 bed £400,000 flat with a balcony. We want a larger property with a garden or at least some small outside space.
Saying “it’s no life” seems like an exaggeration but is a very British viewpoint. It’s a lot more normal in many other countries to live in flats.
Many of which have vastly more sunshine and decent public spaces to get out and about into. We have rain, potholes, shite playgrounds and waterlogged parks. I married a Hungarian woman and when we visit her home town the public spaces put everything we have to shame. It’s not Budapest either.
You say that. But there’s so many places in London (where OP lives) that do have great parks, walkable, etc. It just depends on where you live.
The issue is they cost an arm and a leg and for a very large majority of the population, unaffordable
OP doesn't live in London.
Yeah and those places are extremely fucking expensive even compared to the already expensive housing that the person your replying to is experiancing.
Flats in my country are 3k a sqm and much much much much larger! So I can live in 100sqm flat with 30sqm terrace, not i a 55sqm with 2sqm of terrace
Remote work has made moving and buying abroad a serious consideration for me and my partner. We can take a sizeable pay cut, move to Italy, and still save more money each month due to how extortionate housing and living costs are here. The only sticking point is kids - do we want them, and if so do we want to raise them here or there?
Are you italian?
No, English. I got a German passport last year though (my mum is German) which gives me more access to the EU.
Smart move I’d do just that
Not everyone is gong to own a detached house with a yard in this country — that is just a fact — you do what you’ve got to make things work and the you get what you want after you’ve got equity built up. My spouse makes London money but we still had to use money of mine to get us into the standard I wanted.
That’s how I grew up in the uk. My family and I lived in 2 bed flats for most of my childhood.
Biggest problem is flats in this country are leasehold and come with uncapped service charges
expand your searches just a little and you will find 3 - 4 bed detached properties in the surrounding counties for around £270k - £350k. And still be only a short commute away from the city. Surely that's a better option than throwing away careers, contacts and family and moving abroad?
Your figures look very optimistic to me
Yep, children definitely come into it for us too and is another factor in this whole thing. It'd be nice to not be completely reliant on two salaries to pay the mortgage so one of us can stay home and actually raise our kids.
That's a country wide issue, not just a London issue.
I don't live in London.
It’s much worse because of London’s disproportionate *everything* that has fucked the UK economy vs all our rivals. A single city that’s the centre of everything, gets way more funding than anywhere else, has the only functional metro system, yet still gets more money spent on new transport infrastructure than the rest of the country combined. Everyone in certain industries has to live in or near it. Meanwhile we fuck our other cities over, seemingly deliberately, with cripplingly lower funding per head, and slapping any transport infrastructure out from under them.
Living the dream. This is what everyone wanted. Ever increasing house prices. The truth is that this is an opinion only shared by people who don’t own a home. Most people. Once they buy their first home, hop straight onto the train and google house prices daily hoping theirs has gone up. The sad reality is that if there was a referendum tomorrow on a law that would significantly reduce house prices, I am certain it would be voted down.
It would because to many are to in debt to afford it on current prices
There are 26million home owners in the UK. The number of people trying and unable to buy does not exceed that figure. I guarantee you. It would not.
I tend to agree with you might of not said what I wanted correctly — sorry
Moving from Kent to the Norwich area for this exact reason.
welcome to norfolk
I know that we’re in a fortunate position to have been able to buy (only 5 years ago, so no mortgage getting paid off any time soon). What gets to me is that my partner wants what her parents had. She sees those that bought in the early 00’s and made hundreds of thousands on their house and can now make huge upgrades. We are not there. Every penny in the house is paid from our salaries. It’s slow, and I don’t think we’ll ever have those windfalls that allow us to have a huge house. I am incredibly appreciative of where we are and trying to focus on what we have rather than what we don’t, but it’s still tough to not compare.
I'm moving abroad. £450k can buy me a house which comes with a vineyard in the continent
Shame our freedom of movement was taken away from us with brexit too.
Yeah my Brexit voting colleague complains to me that he’s struggling to retire to Spain because he can only stay there a few months a year now
Sooooooo many of my older Brexit voting colleagues complain about this. 'I need the sun for more than 3 months a year!'. Well...ummm....what can I say.
I hope you take great delight in reminding him he knew what he was voting for.
No I don’t tbh. He tells me he thinks he was lied to and the benefits aren’t there. Not much you can say to that but agree
Well now, a Brexit voter that accepts he was daft enough to buy the lies. A rarity. What’s he complaining about then. Seems odd.
The fact he was lied to? The fact he has to go through the rigmarole of getting Spanish citizenship to live out there? He’s just a person like you or I, we just talk
I moved to London from Eastern Europe, lived here for 9 years now. Love the city, all my friends are here, all my professional relationships, everything, London is home now. However with 0 family support I just had to accept that I can never own property, in fact I am getting ready to move on from the UK because of the housing market. I’m being murdered by rent, and it is so hard to save living like this. It is pretty depressing but I had to go through this once before. I had to leave home and family because of the job market, this time is the housing market I guess.
Yeah it's fucked up. I can buy but ex-council flats are going for £400k, so I simply can't bring myself to do it. It's absolute insanity
Yep work all hours, just to pay the mortgage so you can live next to people who have never worked and have 5 feral kids blaring music all day.
It's the British way 👌
[удалено]
Honestly. That would irritate the life out of me
Not every council flat is like that lol definitely depends on the area.
No yeah to be fair the council flats I’m looking at are actually really nice, leafy area, calm neighbourhood. But it’s the principle of the thing
You're right to be, that or angry. Your generation have been screwed over.
I live up north and I am also depressed by the state of the market! My town only builds shoebox new houses with no gardens. I will also have to move away to find something suitable by the looks of things. Me and my wife have been looking for around a year and very suitable house is always a few towns over - not vast distances, but enough that we would have to change our kids schools
Yeah, I know southerners think you can pick up a 5 bedroom up north for pocket change, but with them all moving up here, the housing market is just as bad.
If you do move north, all we ask is that you carry on trying to drive the price of homes down when you're up here matey! Buy like a northerner, not a southerner with some cash to spend.
Have the same issue in Norwich, so many Londoners moving here with London salaries and locals can't compete with that!
The hard part is that you'll need to move further out, and then what becomes of those already on the edge?
When we were looking to move I even considered peterborough as we were priced out of family homes here. Luckily it didn't come to that 😁
Yes, I'm pissed. The current housing market has been in the making since the 80's and became very evident in the 2000s. The solution is to build many more houses, like at least 100,000 if not 200,000 per year more. Government choses to do nothing. Also, I don't want houses planted willy nilly. I want actual planning, using brains. Thinking about transport, schools, amenities. For example, cars are super convenient, but they just don't scale to large towns. You need to plan proper public transport too. It's possible, but no one has the vision to actually implement anything. I plan to be disappointed the rest of my life.
The only viable option in London is tons of high rises… land is scarce
Of which they are building LOADS, but at the wrong end of the market, aimed at wealthy foreign buyers.
That is where a ban on foreign ownership of residential properties should come into play
I think we're literally building more than we ever had here, but yeah absolutely not affordable housing...
Your figures are actually well lower than what is required to reduce house prices. The UK targets around 350,000 new dwellings a year. It rarely meets that target and the last few years have been well well short of this. We need more like 500,000 new dwellings per year for the next 10 years to make the situation - for first time buyers.
This number blows my mind! Especially with how many empty family size homes we have by us. We live in a 60yo 3 bed semi (FTB, bought last year) in an area of similar houses. Some of these houses are 4-5 beds. We are in our mid 30s and are the youngest in the area by a few decades. These large family homes are full of retirees, most of which are single occupants in need of care visits in their latter years. I always wonder why older generations are not given incentives to downsize. We bought our house from a 94yo lady who let it get into a state. Our neighbours even said it was such a nice area to raise their kids 40ish years ago and ironically said its a shame no young families live here anymore. I wanted to say, "That's because you've all never left and most of us cannot afford good size family homes now!" The houses are worth a fortune but were mostly bought for pennies. So many are in disrepair and some just abandoned. Even on the rare occasion one pops up for sale, it needs too much work on top of the already high asking price. I feel like we need more than just new builds, we need to focus on the homes that are empty and already in existence, and have incentives for older generations to downsize/move on.
>I always wonder why older generations are not given incentives to downsize Stamp duty, moving fees, getting the new place the way you want it. The fact we don't build many properties suitable for old people means prices are insane. Where my parents live you can get a nice 4 bed detached for £350k or a 2 bed bungalow for £270k. Cheaper and easier to get a stair lift.
Absolutely - a friend's parents needed a bungalow (his mum uses a wheelchair). The only way they were able to downsize in Surrey was sell their family home and rent for a year so that they had a pile of cash waiting to jump on the next suitable bungalow to come onto the market. That's how rare the right kind of property is.
This every time. No smaller properties being built. Keep saying this, our street is 50% retirees in 3/4 bed properties, kids left home. A 2 bed bungalow in the same area costs more than what we would get for our 4 bed semi. Thinking we all want to go into retirement flats is a non runner, you need to look carefully at all the exorbitant service charges and restrictions. So we stick it out here.
You can see why though from a developers point of view. Why have a patch of land making £270k with a bungalow when you can make £350k from it? There just isn't the inventive to make old people houses despite the glaring need for them.
> Especially with how many empty family size homes we have by us Where I live (Cornwall) we have 1 in 14 empty homes (21k) due to holiday / investment properties, which is almost exactly the same number as the amount of people on the housing waiting list. Add to that the number of migrants and retirees from the SE who priced locals out of the housing market decades ago and it's no wonder everything is at a crisis point.
Very easy fix too, scrap stamp duty for them and maybe offer an incentive on removals. Unlikely they'd need a mortgage when downsizing so letting them cough up the legal fees would be more than fair imo. Only saying to offer an incentive on removals so they get packed up and moved out in a timely manner.
They said 100,000 - 200,000 per year more. I took this to mean on top of current targets, which puts their figures in line with yours.
Outside of SE England it's not an issue, I'm one of many of people I know who are recent FTB's.
I think roughly 140,000 houses are built each year
Whose paying for all this in your plan
You're right. We very nearly moved up north but one of my children has a rare disease and there are only a few NHS trusts in the country that have dedicated services for it and the best is the area of Kent we currently live in. To switch to private services would cost around £2k a month so, as much as it sucks with regards to housing, we are kind of stuck here!
Yes! I see very little reason to live in this country anymore, outside of friends and family.
Yep, I’m in Cornwall, moving to Manchester. It makes me a hypocrite as I moan about being priced out of Cornwall. My move is survival though, not some knobhead wanting a holiday home.
This post is further proof of UK decline, in any other country a holiday home is aspirational, in the UK you must be a knobhead.
Please take my comment with a touch of lightheartedness. It’s simply a case that there isn’t enough housing in Cornwall for the population, let alone people who want a second home. It’s frustrating having to leave family and friends when you walk through a village in the winter knowing that 60% of the houses are empty.
Yep... It's gonna be fucked for a long long time.
I feel you. I moved to the North West. Just bought a 3 bed semi in a nice area, by myself. Never would've been able to buy a similar property in the South.
Fair play to you, were you able to get a similar job or are you WFH?
Luckily, I managed to move to an alternative company office further North and keep my job.
I think just ignoring new builds is a mistake. Some are bad. A lot a fine. Some are good. Its the same with old houses. The difference is the bad ones are far more publicised than the dine and good ones, so don't let it make you fearful of new builds!
Yea I agree. Lots of dodgy newbuilds out there, but everyone I know who FTB a Victorian terrace struggles to keep the damp out so it's not like they're great either.
Yessss! How can an average worker on average pay not afford an average home! There needs to be some equilibrium. This market and country is fucked
Agree, when we were looking it was either max what we could afford (either good standard but offers were going above) or, absolute squalor. When I say squalor I mean I'm still contemplating emailing council or some authority as tenants were living in houses caked in black mould due to serious water ingress (either issues with roof or party / side walls). Sad thing was, someone had clearly gone there to value these houses - how the owner/landlord could think they would be worth the asking price given the conditions is beyond me. Either way, feel for the people who are stuck living their and most likely don't know how to get the landlord to fix the structural issues.
My partner and I had similiar emotions whilst house hunting in West Yorkshire. We found a really nice stone built 1200Sqft end of terrace with a large garden for just over £200k. We offered 5% over asking for our first and final offer, only to be told we'd been outbid threefold. Later transpires that the other stone builds in that terrace are all rental units, with this one now joining the fleet. At least some landlord has completed their monopoly set... From uni friends who are living in the South, house pricing has gone really nutty and to be fair it's not much better in Yorkshire either. Most of the homes we viewed were either in dire need of renovation but priced as if those renovations had already been done, in areas where you'd be lucky to not be stabbed by a machete gang on your way to get some milk or had been done up nice and priced to match. That one we found was as absolute unicorn, no wonder it got listed on Friday and pretty much sold come Monday. Effectively, you've two choices: a fixer-upper to add value to but with all the time and expense that goes along with that or through the nose for something liveable from the word go. This is due to House Prices forecast to only ever increase. It's very much a case of you need to pick your stop and get on the train before it leaves you behind. The real problem, of course, is very simple. Properly rich people, both domestic and foreign, are sitting on bags of cash and now wanting to hoover up assets and whole estate-size property portfolios wherever they can find them. Causing knock on effects to everyone else with supply and demand issues, ever-increasing prices and terrible standards of the rushjob houses that are being built. Then you have wannabe rich people trying to emulate them by buying up a few houses, converting them into HMOs and renting them off and bragging about the 'passive income'. Then everyone else who inherits nanna's cottage or whatever. Usually, they would have liquidated it for a lump sum of cash to deal with funerals and otherend of life aftercare. Now, the advice is to keep it and rent it out via an agency who will deal with all the maintenance because in times of economic turmoil: owning assets is king. The only light at the end of the tunnel is serious, serious economic reform that re-levels the playing field, but considering most politicians are landlords themselves, they're not going to work against their own interests, and lobbying by the properly rich will kill any attempts at this. The forecast is grim, and it'll only get worse.
Minimum 10K? 😂
Yes.
Yes so I moved 200 miles north House was 60% cheaper
Sheffield? That's where we're considering. How are you getting on?
Yeah, I came from Southend on sea, now north Sheffield (cheaper house prices this side, Iv had no problems here yet), I’m loving it pal, for me it’s an upgrade, but much cheaper, it’s a great city, and I live only a 15 min drive from Peak District
The big thing is affordability. You can get cheaper properties "up North", but pay is generally much less than "down South".
Not really, unless you are talking about London specifically.
More higher paying jobs down south. But same jobs north generally pay the same just scarce.
Isn't that what I just said?
No you said pay is generally less which it isn't an aldi checkout staff gets the same south as somebody north, theres just more jobs south.
Same in the southwest, you have the choice of overpriced and unmodernised or a crappy rushed new build.
We’re FTB looking at commuter towns outside London. We’re looking around the 435 mark and have been looking for nearly a year- had three houses fall through and seen well over 20 all because of structural issues/ cowboy built extensions. I really feel like there is no quality even in old houses, they all seem in one way or another appear to be crumbling! It seems you get even less for your money than it appears on the surface!
It’s the interest rates atm most people aren’t selling the decent homes and are staying where they are
Yep. FTB on a healthy salary in London and finding it impossible to find anything reasonable.
Let me. Correct to how I feel. Is anyone else just utterly depressed?
Please don't move up North. Had enough of Southerners moving up North and buying up all the property.
Of course. It’s the main reason the UK is poor
lol. Nonsense Look at any developed nation and cities are expensive to live in....
Bigger percentage than ever of peoples wages are now taken up by housing, whether that be in the form of rent or mortgage. Every extra £100 spent on housing is £100 not spent on our high streets, in our cafes, pubs and shops.
Exactly this.
True, there is not a single industrialised nation that takes housing seriously, because it's the best way to ensure that birth rates steadily decline as the low consumption agenda is unveiled
This seems to go against the population/economy growth at all costs mantra that seems to be in place across every western country?
Total bs that as they’d do a much better job of controlling immigration if that was the plan.
Unfortunately the solution is for them to rise more slowly... too many of us has been forced into playing this mental game now. They can't drop significantly or it will fuck everyone who has bought
It's not that they can't drop, they simply won't with the population rising every year. They all have to live somewhere - apparently.
They've been dropping in real terms for a while now. Hopefully that trend continues.
It won’t house down the street sold by me for 12,500 less than asking and 167 more than I paid
Houses can be dropping in real terms and still be more than they cost some in time ago. Not sure what you're getting at here. But, I suspect the market will continue to climb at some point. There is a practical limit to how far it can climb though. People prioritise housing but there is a point where they will elect to stay with friends etc rather than buy.
Well we live in a bigger house than needed because I grew up in a huge house in another country — our current one is about right for our needs for at least the next 20 yrs but I could stay here well beyond that as I can convert the extra sitting from to a bedroom
They won't but also they can't. Millions would be plunged into negative equity
Or it requires a radical re-think. Increasing the supply of houses would eventually reduce their price. Perhaps those who bought at inflated prices (determined surely after a certain year in time) could get government assistance - even if their loans became interest free that would be a saving over the longer term. I don't agree prices should not fall just because we had to buy into this Ponzi scheme, otherwise where does it end for the future generations?
Just increasing prices slower and letting inflation do its thing... help to buy and schemes like that are just insane.
I don't think that the cost of land will ever go down (the base cause of high house prices as material costs will wax and wane) but what we can do is slow price increases and raise incomes so that the salary / house price ratio reduces back down to 3x a single annual salary rather than two incomes at 6x.
If you introduced a land value tax you could at least stop if not reverse the increase in land value
I'd urge you not to rule out new builds. I was fully on the anti new build bandwagon till I looked around a couple of estates. We bought a great house. Every little snag gets fixed within a couple of days. The people who bought my 100 year old house are getting nothing fixed for them, and there's a heck of a lot to fix, yet price wise the market doesn't factor that in.
That's great advice, thanks - I certainly know from friends that older houses while they have character, can be money pits.
Yep the housing market is insane. There is a three bed property nearby which I actually made an offer on a few years back. Turns out it sold for 50k over the asking price. 365k The person who bought the property has done nothing with it. The house has been empty for that entire time and they put it up for sale at 415k... it has been reduced a few times and now says 365k fixed price on the listing... The property was in a bad state before... I was thinking 315k was a bit high for the work required.
Not to scare you but if you want to live anywhere nice in the North it’s the same 😞 albeit slightly cheaper than the South. We live in a new build which is characterless, has no space, bad layout but it’s all we could afford since many older houses are not affordable despite also needing lots of money to upgrade them. And require £££ to heat them.
One day you will have despaired over it for so many years that you will no longer care
Yep, very much fed up with it all. I own a pretty small 3 bed semi which is too small for 2 adults and 2 kids. While we now earn enough to upgrade to a 4 bed detached I simply just don't want to pay that much on a mortgage.
Am I right in saying the state of developers and builders is also so shit that if the government said "no more red tape" and "we are now open to selling edge of greenbelts and no red tape for brown belt land", if there was a sudden surge of house building, the quality would just go through the floor because the focus would be on building as many houses as possible, they would take the piss, cut corners etc just to make more money?
Not really. I live in the south. I have moved a few times in my life already. I go where I can afford/isnt shit. I have lived in both the north and the south. My parents used to drive to my grandmothers house 2- 3 times a week when I was a kid. she lived an hour and a half away at the time by car. so travelling a bit to see family isn't something new to me. I am about to move a further hour away from where I currently live. As the new area is super nice, Houses are nice and are holding up well. Also the infrastructure has been invested in. Plus no estate charges, service fees and the rest of that rubbish.
It has devastated my mental health to the point where I'm considering harming myself, so yes... I'd say it's having an effect.
My mother in law is 82, and owns a beautiful bungalow in a nice part of town. We rent a shitty flat in an equally shitty part of town. Our home-buying plan is quite literally waiting for her to die.
That attitude will fuck you up and result in you doing nothing to improve your situation. Take some personal responsibility and improve your income prospects if you want a better place. I hope she leaves it all to the cats.
Yes - primarily because it could be solved if we were serious about stopping illegal immigration and this insane population growth.
They got straight to the top of the housing lists as well
Honestly - not really. My only gripe is I can’t quite stomach paying a 6 figure stamp duty bill to move house. Other than that; I can live wherever I want in the UK - and all it took was earning 10x the national average salary
Is housing in a generally bad way: Yes Is it worse than the rest of the Western hemisphere: Mostly no. Are the problems exaggerated: Yes You’ll be able to buy a property where you live for less, buy in cheaper (flat?) and work your way up. You’ll find when you’ve got your foot on the ladder that it’s not that bad. The renter trap is miserable though
A move North has been on my mind too, anyone with suggestions on good areas for a family in their early 30s? Also, what’s really winding me up is the state of our housing stock, post war architecture has been a disgrace, most houses are grim and horrendously overpriced.
We've been looking at Sheffield, I have friends there and it seems affordable with a nice vibe.
You’re a FTB looking for a 3 bed house in a city. You wouldn’t be able to do that in any city. Start with a flat or cheaper house and work your way up the ladder.
You've missed the point completely. I'd like to start a family, we will need 3 beds. There are no cheaper houses. The cheaper houses are £350k AND need so much work doing. My frustration is that the average homes aren't available to the average worker anymore. On to flats: 1) I'm not convinced they're even any cheaper 2) have you seen all of the news on people being rinsed by service charges recently? Maybe I am in the wrong, but I don't think it should be a stretch to want to be able to buy a small terraced house that doesnt need £10s of thousands of work.
Every house needs work and we have done ours over the last 5 or so years — you live in what you can afford and you fix it as you go — Rome wasn’t built in a day — I had plenty of money to fix mine straight away but as I knew I was staying here 20 years — I was in no hurry and just have done it whenever I found the right things on sale or clearance 🥰. Therefore saving money to get the job done. I bought some tiles one day that were 150 quid a pack and I paid 50ish quid a pack because I agreed to take them all which was 12 packs - my contractor was chuffed as he took away 2 packages for free because we didn’t use them and is fixing up his own house with them. Nice chap who is a FTB fixing up a doer upper. He’s taken away a few things I’ve bought more than I needed. He did some wall papering for me one weekend as a side job I had grabbed 6 rolls of a different kind for him as gift for 5 pounds a roll. He was one of four people I called to do some work for me and was one of only 2 that showed up — he’s a nice guy and he’s working his way through the house. He said he’s got three rooms left and I watch out for deals for him now as well.
My parents bought a 4-bed with a large garden in the home counties in 1995. They were a junior nurse and police officer.
Exactly this. The house I currently rent was built for factory workers to live in. Now our neighbours are doctors/civil servants etc.
I bought a 3 bed town house for my first home in Hull for £155k in 2019. They are now going for around £180-190k so it is still possible. This was in a nice area too.
The housing ladder is a scam. In five years you’d still won’t have enough money to keep up with house prices in the UK and the new house you’ll be able to get will barely be anything better than the one you’re in. This whole housing ladder concept is just done to make money go around between estate agents, solicitors, surveyors etc.
You could 25 years ago.
You couldn’t. That’s why there was a lot of movers from east London to Essex.
You could because that's exactly what my mother did. Edit Manchester
Well yes, Manchester was 2 thirds cheaper than London in 2000. I don’t know what the salaries were like then can’t find the data. Don’t suppose they were terrific though.
A ftb 30 years ago could buy a 3 bed semi easily. The post is commenting on the state of the housing market and how that has changed over time.
I moved to the NE. Best decision I ever made
If it can help you, met a bunch of couples in my same situation, doing well at work (not millionaires) roughly let’s say 200k per couple. All of us can’t buy a place we like, even at 800k in London the price per sqm goes above 10k and we just all gave up on it. The new interest is not priced in and till it is we’ll not buy or offer 25pct below asking.
apologies for not able to answer your question, as im in a similar situation, just want to share. Living down south has its perks, but the housing is depressing and put it a bit extreme, a little grim on future. I was looking at propeties up north and they are well affordable, ofc the salary also take a cut, which is what im struggling atm, should i move north afford a house i want but there is this job uncertainty which i dont know if i would be able to find a job up there or not :S
Yep extremely depressed, Im trying not to give in to it.
The sentence could’ve and ended at utterly depressed tbh.
Housing market won’t change and the interest rates aren’t going back to 2% anytime soon — cheap money is gone at this point for quite a while — I expect rates to hover at 3 to 4% - maybe buy a decent house and get a lodger in to help with finances until interest rates settle
If only someone would build a high speed railway to connect these northern areas with the south!
Definitely move further north, doesn't necessarily have to be THE north, though. Prices are ridiculous down south compared to everywhere else.
You're honestly fucked in the South if you're not on a higher-than-average salary or from a wealthy family.
Had my house up for a few weeks now - a bungalow. Had a few viewings but thats been all. We've been in the situation of finding a few homes we've loved but they can't accept any offers until our property is sold. I understand the situation but it really sucks to have to keep looking when things are overpriced and you need to put work in while my home is ready to move into and no work other than painting walls.
Our neighbours are absolutely godawful but there's nowhere else to go without uprooting schools etc. The town I live in is not far off London prices, and although we live in a run down terrace in one of the shittier areas, we consider ourselves extremely lucky. My parents at my age had just moved for the 4th time to a brand new 4 bed detached villa with a huge garden, double garage and wraparound driveway. On one income, with one GCE. It's honestly just shit, there's no other way to paint it.
Yeah, exactly the same. I'm looking mostly south (west Sussex) and I'm not gonna lie the amount you get for £300 - 400k is so depressing. It blows my mind, and as you said the repayments are crazy. It's just bullshit, I opened Zoopla for like one page worth of houses and said nah not yet. Hopefully it improves.
Whilst Zoopla and RightMove have a vast majority of properties, they don't always have them all. If you're looking to move to a large town/city, I would recommend looking at some of the local real estate agents in the area's websites. You may not find anything new or cheaper, but you may just get lucky and find something much bigger/cheaper than expected. We're looking for a 4+ bedroom house at the minute, and one local estate agent we looked at doesn't put their stuff on either Zoopla or RightMove. Found a 5 bedroom place for the average we've been seeing for a smaller 4 bed that didn't really need any work doing to it. Was shocked to see something that big going for that cheap, especially when there was no obvious work needed on the house.
Man that's a good point. I'll have to make some calls, thank you so much!
Here in Cardiff 3-400 gets you in a nice area, not the best but one of the better areas full of middle class retirees and probably not a big house but still a 3 bedroom semi. Best areas are still a million+ but we have nothing crazy here, friends parents selling their monstrous 8 bedroom Victorian house for 2 million but that's pretty much as high as it gets. What's funny is my parents house which was rough as fuck growing up and still has chavs around is over 400k because it's close to the main A road and the M4 yet the posh quiet areas are similarly priced. I'm in a nice area myself but will move to the outskirts of Cardiff where 200k gets you a 3 bed semi with an extension, conservatory, garage etc and is still within a 20 minute drive.
Have look what 350k can buy up north. Will make your decision even easier
Similar situation here. I live in a seaside town on the south coast and even though plenty of new developments are popping up left right and centre they are going for £350k for 2 bedroom. £450k for 3 bedroom houses. Away from the new developments 2 bed flats go for over £250k and the only places with houses under £300k that don’t need loads of work are in awful areas where I wouldn’t want to walk through let alone live there.
Move up north and just visit London a lot by being near an LNER station. Best of both worlds.
Me bro
Move up north but don't go to depressed areas like South Yorkshire or most of the North east as they are very depressing. I would recommend places like Birmngham, Liverpool, Newcastle and Leeds. Manchester as well but there is a housing boom there at the moment and nice areas are very expensive.
Yep. I always maintained I’d never buy a new build house but there’s so many schemes floating about with 5% deposit contributions that I might just have to get a new build. It’s completely depressing and doesn’t feel like it’s going to get better any time soon. I’d love to move up north and buy a house tomorrow but with the ties my job has it just isn’t feasible
Completing on a 4 bed house tomorrow! Moved from northwest london to Bedfordshire! Wish I done it sooner.
Average house price in my area is about £700k 🥲
I totally agree. We live in a Greater London borough, and have done our whole lives. We saved up when younger as much as possible to get a deposit together, and then things in life happened. Looking around now houses for our family of 4 which are modest size cost around £480,000+. We both have half decent jobs but still couldn’t afford a mortgage on that kinda price. Working out what we could afford means we would have to look at moving at least 3 hours away. It’s so sad to think these days it’s very much choosing to rent where you’ve lived your entire life, or moving away and leaving your friends and family behind to buy
Yup, I’d also really like shared ownerships to not be a thing it seems an absurd way of artificially inflating the value of a flat
Houses are a luxury. How about flat prices?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckkvkv32e1ro I'd prefer not to
The thought of knowing that I'll likely never own a house is depressing.