I’m very privileged when it comes to housing.
My family gave me a £50k deposit for a small city house, which was bought at £240k plus fees etc in 2015. I took responsibility for the fees and paid the mortgage etc. I had to get a 35 year mortgage as that was only basis that I would be leant to on, even being a higher rate tax payer.
In 2020, it sold for £330k. It’s now apparently worth £400k.
So for someone today to be given the same opportunity that I had, they would have to stump up an additional £160k in cash (£210k total). That’s only 7 years later.
Assuming that you didn’t have any help from relatives, how long would it take you to save up £210k cash…? That’s before you even factor the dramatically increased costs of everything in the last 2-3 years.
(Obviously affordability depends on salary, disposable income, location, whether you have a partner sharing the mortgage etc and how much a bank will lend you - so this example is knowingly limited in scope)
Yes, every generation has their own problems to overcome but I think it’s very fair to say that’s the up and coming adults have an insanely difficult time with housing compared to even what I had.
While a multi-facted problem, the nub of that is the asset inflation we have seen combined with wage stagnation, which has led house prices move from their long term norm of 3-4x salary to the current 9-10x, which then ofc makes them difficult to afford for FTB's
If 100% mortgages still existed then all of the people in here wouldn't be complaining about renting prices and landlords.
Just looking here https://www.statista.com/statistics/804446/property-tenure-distribution-in-the-united-kingdom/ and I'd say there's other factors at play.
It seems private rentals accounted for ~10% of the market in the '80's with this rising to a current ~20%. And it started rising through the period of 100% mortgages.
Whilst I empathise with a lot of @Zenduri points, I disagree with his absolute stance that no-one wants to rent. I certainly did for a lot of my early years and was quite late (in comparison to my peers) before getting on the housing ladder. Landlords fulfil a need, it's probably just that sector has got unbalanced, with BTL LL's taking a larger part of the housing stock nowadays.