Cornwall's broken housing market

esoteric said:
Renting for life yo!
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2 bed appartements cost €250-€350 a month to rent in my very rural Department’s capital and a two bedroom new build house with a driveway and garden (single storey, open plan kitchen/living room) goes for €80-€90K.

I know it’s not a big 24/7 city like Bordeaux or Toulouse, but a couple with retail/semi-skilled jobs can afford their own home out here.
 
My mother's house where I lived from 1987 (and she still lives now)

1987 purchase price £10,000 - at the time it had no heating, no bathroom, an outdoor toilet, bakelite switches, and needed serious remedial work - I think, from memory, they spent about the same getting it into a livable condition over a period of three years (we lived in it the whole time, even when it was a shell in places)

2023 value is somewhere in the region of £160,000 I think.

Prices not adjusted for inflation
 
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Terminal_Boy said:
2 bed appartements cost €250-€350 a month to rent in my very rural Department’s capital and a two bedroom new build house with a driveway and garden (single storey, open plan kitchen/living room) goes for €80-€90K.

I know it’s not a big 24/7 city like Bordeaux or Toulouse, but a couple with retail/semi-skilled jobs can afford their own home out here.
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That's as it should be. The UK is completely broken.
 
I think there will be some significant change over the coming years.

The interest rate change is going to bum so many people, the pain is going to be constant and unrelenting for so many.

The whole situation is broken and stupid.
 
Welcome to the hypocritical UK. We struggle to climb the housing ladder and once we're up there we kick it away to stop the poors below us getting a chance.

Typical case in point: The estate I live on went up in the late 90's. The vast majority of people on it then objected to a new estate going up the other side of the 'B' road we turn off for the usual reasons @FoxEye mentioned (no new amenities etc) - every single one of which would have been equally applicable to our houses. Planning permission did go through after the council (allegedly) pulled a few shenanigans.

I refused to support the campaign and when challenged I pointed out my kids will be priced out the market when people act like this. They're certainly going to be reliant on elderly relatives leaving them something in wills.

Solutions:
- The green belt rules are not fit for purpose any more. They're mostly "protecting" crap. What was right in the 1950's isn't right now. The focus for no building should be our genuinely beautiful countryside under the areas of outstanding natural beauty designation, not scrub land, farms and golf courses on the edge of town.
- Proper commitment to building homes at national and local levels. The industry never invests because each project is possibly the last so there's no incentive to try new things, invest in skills etc.
- No tax discounts for second homes. You're rich enough to buy one, pay the full whack. I don't care if your bins only need emptying 4 times a year, pay up.
 
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I think pretty locations like Cornwall will be affected by the change in working pattern after COVID. For example I can work from any location in the country and still get my job done. I do work a hybrid pattern but several people at my company are fully remote and if I really needed to then I'm sure I could get agreement to work fully remote too. So people like myself can sell their houses in the South East, move to Cornwall, the Lake District, etc, etc, and still continue to work at their London based job. That must push rural prices up. I've wanted to do it for a while but we have other reasons to stay here (my wife can't work fully remote and my son has friends, girlfriend and school here).
 
Terminal_Boy said:
2 bed appartements cost €250-€350 a month to rent in my very rural Department’s capital and a two bedroom new build house with a driveway and garden (single storey, open plan kitchen/living room) goes for €80-€90K.

I know it’s not a big 24/7 city like Bordeaux or Toulouse, but a couple with retail/semi-skilled jobs can afford their own home out here.
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France is 2x bigger than UK and those rural areas are heavily depopulated, not a fair comparison. It's reaely cheap up North as well because there is no jobs worth moving there for.. sure it's cool if you can work from home I guess.
 
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It's always been like that in Cornwall and one of the reasons I moved away to join the RAF in 1989. The jobs are crap and low paid and it was always a struggle to get a step on the housing ladder. Back in 1986 my at the time fiancee and I moved in together in a 1 bed ground floor flat at £50 a week which was almost half my weekly pay. I worked for W & S Stevensons on the market and Iceworks in Newlyn. It was a dead end job with very long hours, sometimes 2am in the morning to 10pm at night during busy periods but at least I was earning a proper pay unlike most of my mates who were on YTS for £25 a week. Towards the end of the 80's I could see the end coming for the fisheries and still with no prospects of ever affording a mortgage or getting a decent job and learning a trade I joined the RAF to train as a Mechanical Engineer. My first posting out of training was RAF St Mawgan at Newquay and house prices there were just astronomical even back then. To cut a long story short my by now wife (now ex wife) spent my money before I had earnt it so was always struggling through the months even on a decent pay. Needless to say I never did get to invest in a house and 12 postings in 13 years didn't help either (I had a knack of getting posted to stations that were closing) and now I am stuck in the NE of Scotland with zero chance of ever affording a move back home to my beloved Cornwall.
 
850k , 2 bed flat in Hackney London overlooking Victoria Park. ( we rented it )

So is this another bank saving interest rates were less than the effort of opening a bank account vs let’s invest my money in property argument ?

Another entitlement thread -Simple , do what I did and move.
 
My grandparents were forced to sell their house during the 07 crash, at roughly £350k. The same property now is valued at 1.2m.


The only work I can see which has been done is the super old garage ripped out and replaced.
 
It's not just Cornwall and London.

I was 3 in 1985 when my parents bought a 4 bedroom detached house for £60,000. They sold it in 1998 for £145,000 and now it's worth nearly £700,000 according to Zoopla.

(Chelmsford, Essex)
 
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What a lot of people don't know about Cornwall is that it was never taken over to the Anglo Saxons and remains England's last Celtic realm. The people are a mixture of ancient Celtic people and Romanised Britons and as a result of all the mixing they came up with their own dialect called 'Brythonic'. It turns out when you translate the word Cornwall from Brythonic to modern English it means 'marry your cousin'. True story.
 
FoxEye said:
And where do you suggest people move to?
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And who does he expect to do all the essential jobs that don't pay anything like enough to live near where the prices are silly high?

I think some people forget that if everyone moved to where housing was cheaper there would be literally no one left in some places to do the "little jobs" like street cleaning, rubbish collection, teaching little Tarquin.
 
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