House prices rose 7.3% this year, average now almost £250k

[HACO]

Is 500k the only option for you here though? Could you get a smaller place / place further away from city centre (not sure where you are) and then build capital on that?

I want to get a place to live, rather than an investment hoping for the price to go up to push me ahead of the younger people.

Just do what I did - have your girlfriends Mum die and leave you some money - bloody entitled youngsters

That's the way to go

What exactly are you getting for a 500k house?

I'm just wondering whether you need to compromise a little in order to get onto the ladder. In terms of getting a 450k mortgage, you must have a household income of close to 100k? and you've only managed to save a 50k deposit?

Numbers don't seem to add up here..

I haven't had that income since the day I was born, lol.

I think this is what Bald Eagle means about being entitled. Surely it'll be better to buy a cheaper property and save more for the next step in a couple of years? I doubt this 500k place is the only option, where do you live and what are your requirements?

There are cheaper options, but those are not suitable for my family and I don't want to take them away from the families who are suited to them.

I'm sure you've considered buying something affordable now and then moving to your ideal home, what's your thinking around this option if you don't mind me asking?

Taking a house I don't want to live in off the market, away from someone who may want to live in it. Nope.

You know paying mortgage interest is also slaving away for someone else’s benefit ?

If you accepted a compromise and bought somewhere smaller for a few years you’d now be in the house you want. A £500k first house is rather ambitious ! The phrase ‘getting on the ladder’ wasn’t invented for no reason

My ladder starts at £500k

The whole concept of "property ladder" basically assumes never-ending property price increases and screwing over of future first time buyers. I'm not going to participate in that. I only buy a house that I like to live in, at a time that I can afford it. If I can't find that property, I won't take that chance away by taking a property off the market that is ideal for someone else.

 

[HACO]

Okay I was being fully supportive but you are edging on being very righteous.

I don't participate in activities that I find unethical. E.g. I would never become a BTL landlord. I know it's a crazy idea but all I want from a house is a place to live in. Not its price appreciation, not its land value, not its ability to put me up a 'ladder' by putting my feet on someone else's shoulders.

You are already participating in the system of perpetual property increases as that is fundamentally how the world economy works. You will be left behind if you aren't slightly more cognisant of the moving milestones rather than just moaning about them, lol.

That's just not true. Japan didn't have property price appreciation above inflation for 25 years and housing became more and more affordable compared to wages as time went by, their economy didn't collapse. The world didn't end. Land owners didn't die of hunger.

Ever increasing property prices at 5x the inflation rate is only a thing in a handful of countries. In most countries, it increases inline with inflation.

It's funny how we assume this is the only way to have a functioning economy, lol.

 

[HACO]

Strange way of looking at it. I don't think anyone expects to buy their forever home as their first home.

So the way you see it, you'll begrudgingly continue renting somewhere until you can afford the house you like? You are also participating in the rental market, taking away a suitable rental from someone else whilst contributing to the demand, pushing the rental prices up.

There's no suitable rental property for anyone. It's always exploitative as long as it's for-profit. I'd rather take a hit myself while renting than screw over someone else by buying an unsuitable property in the hope of its price appreciation.

 

[HACO]

Do you not participate in the stock market either? Presumably you are saving your cash under a mattress.

A lot more unethical behaviour going on there with much bigger gains than some old bloke cashing in his pension to do a BTL.

I don't invest in companies that do unethical things either, e.g. military industrial complex.

Stock market is also not a matter of life necessity. Buying a BTL = taking 1 house away from someone who can own and live there, to extract profit from them for your own benefit. Owning a Google stock is not a matter for survival, housing is a need for human survival. People don't live in stock markets but still need a roof over their heads.

 

[HACO]

I dunno man, the BTL market meant I could live in Zone 1 and plod along to St Pancreas Station in 10 minutes.

I could never have bought the place.

Mine was to get a lifestyle, but people also leverage the rental market to test out areas they may want to live, get into good schools, temporarily look after loved ones.

Which BTL's specifically offend you?

Why couldn't you buy that place? Because BTL landlords bought all the properties, decreasing the housing supply and therefore prices have skyrocketed.

If there were no or little BTLs, all those properties would have been on the market at much lower prices, you'd have been able to buy your own place and most of the people who rent those places would have been owner occupiers.

 

[HACO]

How do you know exactly how many kids you'll have?
How do you know you won't get divorced in future and end up living alone?
How do you know you won't meet someone else who already has kids and end up living in a large family?
What happens when your kids grow up and move out?

If you try to buy 1 property to suit all your future needs then you're more likely to be taking away an opportunity from someone who suits it better. If you adapt and change properties based on your current needs then you'll only ever have something which suits what you need.

You're misunderstanding me.

1) It's OK to buy a property that's suitable for you NOW, and if your circumstances changed, then move. That's totally fine.

2) People suggested that I buy a property that's UNSUITABLE now, so that its price appreciation will help me buy one that's suitable in the future.

See the difference? The first one I'd do (and that's what I want to do), the second one is what I refuse to do.

 

[HACO]

Very unbalanced view of the world. Definitely some BTL landlord has offended you somehow.

You are ignoring desirability of areas, new employers opening nearby (look what Vodafone did to Newbury ), new travel possibilities opening up (10mins walk to the station to get me into Central Europe, wowza), greanification, tidying up of the canals (Camden town etc).

I would also be competing with a global audience as folk living in central New York, Milan, Frankfurt would see my pokey 1 bed as a bargain for considerably more than I could pay.

Global audience (again BTL landlords of another kind), are part of the problem. In my opinion you shouldn't be able to buy a property in the UK unless you are resident in the UK, or at the very least it should be taxed something like 500% of the value, to be invested in building social and affordable housing.

Prices can increase due to all those factors and these are facts of life, however, BTL landlords are not a fact of life and proper policy can make sure the can't exploit those less fortunate than them.

BTL landlords are the payday lenders of the housing industry, and in the UK they have a completely unregulated market with significant tax treatments benefits (i.e. they are subsidised by our tax money).

 

[HACO]

So with that logic, if there were no international buyers or BTL landlords, we should all be able to afford 5 bed houses in Zone 1 London if that's suitable for our needs?

Of course not. But that £700k 2-bed flat in Camden would cost a lot less. It's simple supply and demand, If someone buys half the houses , the rest of the people would be competing for fewer houses, pushing up prices. Those who couldn't afford to buy anymore (like you) will be forced to rent from the guys who bought half the houses, paying off their mortgage instead of your own.

And I think you're enjoying that

Owner occupation is now at a historically low rate in the UK, BTL at an all time high, wages completely stagnant and declining, yet property prices keep going up and share of BTL has increased every single year in the last 10 years.

 

[HACO]

And that's the problem people have been pointing out to you since the start of the thread.
What makes the cheaper property unsuitable? Is it uninhabitable? Is there some sort of dangerous problem with the construction?
It's not actually "unsuitable", it's just that you'd have to make some compromises and you don't want to do that.

Your moral standpoint makes no sense anyway:


If BTL landlords buy all the properties then the only opportunity you're taking away by buying a hosue for yourself to live in is from a BTL landlord.

Suitable = number of rooms equal to people living in it, and within a 45 min commute to work, that will cost me a minimum £500k.

I know, I desire too much and should be happy with 3 hour commute or 3 people per room else I'm being entitled

 

[HACO]

I can never understand the number of people who commute for hours, especially when rail season tickets are £7k to £10k these days (daylight robbery).

As we've seen in the topic, to some people wanting a commute that's shorter than an hour and doesn't cost £10k in season tickets is considered being entitled and unreasonable.

I'm very interested to hear your numbers then.

500k property, 50k deposit = 450k mortgage.

Most lenders are offering in the region of 4.25-4.75x annual salary - so your earnings would need to be in the range of 95k-106k.

I didn't necessarily mean you were on 100k, but even if you and your wife/partner were on 50k each, which lead to my follow on questions of how can you both be on that much but have only saved up a 50k deposit.

How much you save up is a function of your income and time. So I refer back to my answer, it wasn't always that high. That's a relatively recent thing. It was a lot lower even 2 years ago.

£500k for a first house. Just lol.

Sounds like someone is triggered.

 

[HACO]

The best is when you hear people say the classic reaction to how much rent you pay "but you can get a mortgage for that". Then you ask them if they have the equivalent deposit amount needed in the bank and they stfu.

Especially true in London. For your mortgage to be similar to that £1500 rent you sometimes need a £200k deposit.

 

[HACO]

It's completely different.

You (or anyone else) buying a house they don't need, and taking if off the market, incrementally impacts the ability of FTB to buy a house that they do need.

Let's face it, a lot of BTL are buying up the basic starter homes precisely because it forces people to rent.

It's a calculated move to divide this country into the portfolio owners and the perpetual renters.

And people get a taste for it, and they don't stop at one or two BTL properties, they get greedy.

We *need* a limit on the amount of homes people can buy and not live in. And companies that aren't non-profit housing associations, govt bodies, or care homes, should be *banned* from owning residential property full stop.

Isn't that effectively North Korea? /s

 

[HACO]

A good post in that it's not just the building of houses that is needed but everything associated with them.

Selling land doesn't really help because it's the councils who restrict where you can build and what you can build on it. I had a friend who had a house on a huge plot of land and wanted to build another house - everything would already be there (power, electric, etc). Naturally the council would not allow it because everyone would be doing this with land......but we should be encouraging it. Supply is a problem, so let a hundred thousand people build like this and ease some of the supply issues.

The scale of the shortage is just so big that anything other than a countrywide mobilisation effort in the scale of WW2 would be unable to make a meaningful difference. We need to build an extra 500,000 houses per year for the next 15 years (e.g. skyscrapers and cities from scratch), and then maybe, maybe, we'll have a reasonable housing supply for our population.

England's population density is similar to Japan's, yet our housing policies pretend like we're similar to Canada. Makes zero sense. And unlike Japan, our population is growing even more. We should see what Japan did to have 25 years of no housing price increases.

We should also be looking into land reclamation to give ourselves more land to build on. Northern European Enclosure Dam is an interesting opportunity that we may need to pursue.

 

[HACO]

Starting with letting people build, council approved, houses on decent land is a great start.

- The houses wouldn't put pressure on the local area as we are talking about a handful of houses dotted all around.
- Individual houses would be built by smaller companies and solo building firms rather than the big developers.
- The infrastructure is already there.

One of the biggest hindrances to new houses is council green belt rules - or whatever they are called. They exist for a reason but you have to bend a bit in times of great need.

You're missing the point, these are all rounding errors compared to the scale of the problem, and will only distract from the real issue. We need an overhaul of the entire housing system.

We need to raise £100 billion a year, put 2 million people to work and built 500,000 houses every single year. The money can be raised by bringing property taxes inline with most of the developed world (average OECD property tax revenue per total country's property wealth is about 2%, UK is about 0.50%). People need to be trained, lands will need to be renationalised, industries will need to be reignited. Pre-fabrication and other elements from economies of scale need to be used.

This is not about empowering billionaires to do the right thing, time for that has passed. These motherfrackers have shown again and again that they won't do the right thing. We need the government to interfere, and take on the role of the builder of last resort.

There has been a housing shortage for years.....is the current method working? Why would you oppose anything that could alleviate this shortage?

You're thinking small scale. There are tens of thousands of people with enough land, money or access to money to build houses but they cannot because of planning. It could be a nice 3 bed detached, a few flats, whatever.

No, YOU are thinking small scale. The real scale of the problem means it's outside of the market forces, there are no tens of thousands of benevolent billionaires sitting on land waiting to build them if only they're allowed. If these benevolent land owners were going to do the right thing, they'd have done it decades ago. God knows the entire government, local or national, is in the pockets of the landowner class.

These landowners who have kept the land away to create supply shortages will need their lands to be renationalised, built on by a non-profit government project, and sold to owner-occupied first-time buyers at zero margin (on conditions that capital gains are taxed at 100% above inflation, letting is not permitted, empty properties are heavily taxed, etc).

 

[HACO]

You told us earlier that anything with more than a 45 minute commute into London or has expensive travel to London isn't acceptable to you. Where are you going to reclaim enough land to build your new cities which fits that citeria?
Or is the plan than you get other people to go and live in these new cities so that you can have a nice house in London?

What a ridiculous attempt at a personal attack. I think I may have hit a nerve that you even remember that in such level of detail, please, take it easy on yourself.

Land reclamation comes at seas, and yes, you also need to build the high speed commute infrastructure to get these people where they will be most economically productive.

 

[HACO]

Renationalisation. Taking land from billionaires. Government built. Zero margin.

...and then you wake up from the dream and go make a coffee.

It won't happen anytime soon. I'm just pointing out what we need to do. Maybe after a political uprising by the young generation we'll get some concessions.

Yes, I am a pessimist. I have very little confidence in our ability to maintain our civilisation and way of life in the long term.

 

[HACO]

I doubt that either.

I imagine most future politicians (those in 20/30/40 years time) will likely have inherited a lot of land/properties from their parents, and it's unlikely they'll just give it all away.

Britain's population boom is slowing down, and there's even concerns that it'll contract and we'll have a future will a smaller population. That's likely to have a greater effect on housing availability, than persuading a load of rich people to give up their land.

You don't persuade them, you eat the rich They can take away their lands to foreign countries if they want to, or wait, they can't

So you want to take away the land of those that pay the highest taxes in numbers to give away.

Then in a years time when tax revenues fall to historically low levels how do you suggest you pay for all these schemes?

Good old Sonny thinks bringing land taxation to a level compared to OECD average results in tax revenues falling to historically low levels.

Reminds me of hacks in the US who say providing healthcare to everyone will bankrupt the country.

I'm not sure how you've managed to take that personally - it's not intended as a personal attack.

Lots of people have pointed out that there's cheaper housing available in various other parts of the country but your argument was that you need to be in London. How will a new city built on reclaimed land outside of London be any different?

It did feel like a personal attack, if it wasn't intended that way, I take your work for it.

Our housing crisis doesn't start and end with me and I do care beyond my own personal needs. I want to live in a country where good quality housing is not only for the rich, but available to anyone earning an average income.

Median housing price to household income is now over 9x in the UK, over 11x in England. Saying "cheap houses are there outside London" doesn't solve our housing crisis. Cheaper housing might be available for someone with a high London salary, but those are still very expensive for locals.

Like I said, "countrywide" plan, not "Londonwide" plan.

 

[HACO]

Jesus your worse than foxeye.

Can you read?

Because I never said anything like that.

You said to take all their land away nothing about taxation in the post I quoted.

Do you have dementia?

When you take all their land away. Tax revenues fall. How are you proposing to pay for all these schemes with no money?

Nationalisation isn't taking someone's stuff away. Land nationalisation happens every single day in every single country. It's called compulsory purchase in English Land Law. I'm proposing that it should be done to help with our housing and land shortage.

You tax existing land at levels comparable to OECD average and you raise an extra £100 billion per year, every single year, for the rest of time. Yes, your rental income will go down, yes, your property won't appreciate as fast as it has, guess what? You'll survive and tens of millions will be much better off.

How awful would it have to be for poor landlords that they'd have to have a lifestyle comparable to other landlords in other OECD countries? If landlords need therapy after it, I'm sure the communist NHS will be happy to provide.

I know, it's communism to you. No wonder. Anything that changes the status quo towards making things better for the poor and younger generation seems crazy to you, a beneficiary of the current state of things.

Like I said before, I don't expect you to support these policies, they won't benefit someone whose family has massive property portfolios and has benefited from rental income for a very long time. After all, from what I understand, this is how you life your life. You take income other people pay for the privilege of being on the land you and your family have acquired.

The rest of us who work for a living and have to sort out our housing have a slightly different prespective.

 

[HACO]

I looked up the biggest land owners in the UK. Ironically, but not surprisingly once you see them, none of the Top 5 are billionaire individuals:

1. Forestry Commission
2. National Trust
3. MOD
4. The Crown
5. RSPB

Made me laugh a little. I actually know the first individual ranked at no. 6 and he is actually a billionaire on paper.

These are all the government, lol. Do you want to sum up roads, hospitals, schools, etc as well? I hear NHS has some prime real estate!

Are you surprised that the biggest land owner in the country is the government? Did you actually think before you wrote the post?

Go and look up PRIVATE land ownership and the role the aristocracy plays in land ownership in the country.

Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population (2500 people)

1700's Britain

Wah wah evil rent charging Crown land owners wah wah who do they think they are

2020

wah wah evil working/middle class property owners who do they think they are

Read above, and learn something.

Do you seriously think the 1% of the population that owns 50% of England are working or middle property owners?

I'm just speechless.

 

[HACO]

What kind of statistic is 50% is owned by 1%? Talk about getting the numbers to match a narrative.

The study found that 50% of land in England is owned by 2500 people. Do you have any other study to rebut this or is it just your way of saying you're ignoring facts because life is more comfortable in ignorance?

I'm sure people are going to argue that these 2500 people are working class people who worked hard to buy these properties for themselves and it's unfair to tax/renationalise them as it sends them into poverty and it's unfairrrrrrrr