Looking at buying a flat

im so glad i live in the northeast. My girlfriends sister is a teacher in london and she paid 250k for a 1 bed apartment.

I would probly end up living on the streets in london. To expensive for me :(
 
Central scotland, 15 mins walk from a train station to Glasgow or Edinburgh. 3 story, 4 Bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, extension, drive/parking/garden etc etc.

£120K.

Bought it last year, this year I doubt we'd even get accepted for a mortgage the way the housing market has gone.
 
White Mouse said:
The minimum wage really has ****** things up in this country for normal people.
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Blame the banks and the increased amounts of credit they have given on mortgages to any John Doe over the last few decades for pushing up prices. They have caused the biggest property bubble in history.

Blame the foreign money and foreigners for the London prices that will probably never come down now.

Blame the average Joe for buying into the property hype whereby he will pay the costs of his own slavery with a mortgage which he may never be able to pay off.

The scandalous thing is that speculators have been allowed to make millions of items of necessity (housing). How about monopolising all the food sources and see how much the free market can pay. Luckily they have laws against that.
 
I blame BTL and absolutely despise it. They need to bring back rent control soon or there quite literally will be a generation unable to buy a home and even rent one. Demand for renting is going through the roof already. Give it another year or so and there will be trouble. If you rent at the moment, just think if your landlord says he's increasing the rent by 20%. What could you do? Absolutely nothing. Move out? What if all rent has gone up 20%?

We need to bring back rent control and improve rights for tenants drastically.
 
Finding myself in a situation right now where I'm going to need to rent privately for at least a year before buying again.

Rent prices is making me 'LOL' and left wondering how on ****ing earth anyone on national average can afford to live (in London). Is it any wonder that our personal debt levels is so high? For a year I'm going to be working to pay some greedy **** a fortune every month in order to live in a decent place without having to downgrade myself too severely. And no, I cannot move out of London due to work and other commitments.

I can never condone people giving up work and living off the state, but I'm certainly starting to understand WHY they're doing it.
 
Yeah blame everybody else.

How about the fact that mortgages/housing was excluded from the inflation rates quite a few years ago? allowing for this misalignment of wages and house prices? If house price increases were part of inflation then wages would have kept up with them - but the government's of the time didn't like that, they enjoyed getting the votes of the people who felt rich by owing equity that kept increasing in price.

It'd be interesting to see what inflation would have been like if housing was kept part of it. That would have slowed done the massive boom and protected somewhat from the subsequent spectacular bust.

London would probably be just as expensive though due to the sheer ridiculous size of demand.

As for the British houses having more character against the american ones..please!!!! give me a 3bed detached with no character over a 1bed victorian flat ANY TIME. I want to live life like a human, not like a battery farm chicken.
 
Prices in London are all about location, you have to compromise on something. I bought a house in Leyton for the price of a flat elsewhere just because the area has a bad reputation. If you want somewhere in a nice area and cheap that's doable as well, but you'll have to walk 20min to the nearest station or get the bus.
 
Why not move out of London ? I work in London at the moment (until march next year) and I live in Milton Keynes. Sure the commute is a pain but at least I got a decent place to live.

meh not that I give a damm as March next year I will be moving out to Brussels for work so :p
 
Morba said:
why would that happen? sounds a silly number to pluck out of the air
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Not attempting to justify where the poster got that figure from, however it does not sound totally unreasonable to me. I have been renting for one year and now, at the end of the tenancy period, the landlady wishes to sell up. Of course, this has left me to find another place to rent - I am in the typical position of easily being able to make mortgage repayments but do not have enough for an initial deposit.

I found even locating a new flat difficult - Places were going immediately... Details on agent websites, listed in their shop windows... All gone. Indeed, it is becoming common for people to offer above the asking price for rent. I was signed up with all of the agents in the local area... Nobody had anything, and when they did somebody who was on the list earlier than me snapped it up.

This weekend gone I finally did manage to find somewhere to rent, but the price is approximately 20% more than I was paying before. The properties are very similar (location, etc) however this is just how the prices have changed.

I really felt as though I had no choice, I could not really 'downgrade' (I was only in a 1 bed to begin with, shared with my partner). I work in the area and am over 100 miles away from family, so moving back home was not a possibility. I have had no choice but to up the rent.

My only saving grace (or at least I try and see it as a positive) is the new place is a 2 bed rather than 1 bed, but luckily I got it for the prices that 1 bed were going (I found this new place listed by the landlord privately).

Honestly, rental payments are getting ridiculous... And as rent goes up the amount I can afford to save goes down meaning longer till I have the required deposit amount. And no doubt the longer I'm renting the more years of increasing rental prices too. All of this whilst salaries, etc, are staying fixed.

I honestly thought, a year ago, that I was lucky and that the 'economic climate' had not hit me, but it seems it's finally caught up.
 
Having been renting for the past 5 years now, I am not seeing anything like that in terms of an increase. In the past 3 years our rent has gone up around 5%.
Similar and worse properties in our area are actually more expensive than ours, but not 20% more expensive, maybe 5% at worst.
 
Broadly speaking it costs the same to pay a mortgage as it would be to be paying rent in London for the same spec place (I'm looking at 2 bed flats as well).

I blame Labour for encouraging Buy to Let... so many people have gone into property, often owning houses that should be in the hands of people looking to buy their own place. Housing benefit is also partly to blame, around where I work (Shoreditch) housing benefit is about £250 a week, so you won't find anything for less than that.
 
Housing benefit is a massive problem. That Judas Boris is actually opposing the governments plans to cap it. To give you an idea of how bad it is, in my area of London 45% of the school kids are going to have to leave their schools as their families are not going to be able to afford to live around here when the cap comes in. Good riddance I say. There is no logical reason why taxpayers should subsidise incompetents to live in nice parts of London.
 
EdwardTeach said:
Good riddance I say. There is no logical reason why taxpayers should subsidise incompetents to live in nice parts of London.
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Totally agree. If you cannot afford to live in our Nations capital in an area you actually like, leave. There's no way housing benefit should be supporting this and putting families of 6 in monster houses in Richmond etc...Nobody is entitled to a house imo. You have to work for it; or live in Burnley or something. It's much cheaper over that way ;)
 
Adsta said:
Why not move out of London ? I work in London at the moment (until march next year) and I live in Milton Keynes. Sure the commute is a pain but at least I got a decent place to live.

meh not that I give a damm as March next year I will be moving out to Brussels for work so :p
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I'm actually seriously considering it at the moment.
 
EdwardTeach said:
Housing benefit is a massive problem. That Judas Boris is actually opposing the governments plans to cap it. To give you an idea of how bad it is, in my area of London 45%..
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thats good? why should my tax be wasted on over priced housing for people who cannot afford their rent?

maybe we need to build some cheap houses in scotland.....

if they dont work, or cannot afford to rent in an area they should move...
 
So you guys think that once social renters have been priced out of the more central areas of London rent prices should fall? Surely landlords will keep private rent at the same prices or even increase them due to lack of income from social renters?
 
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