AIBU to be gutted my house has lost me money?

Yeah surely the “profit” on it is the money you have hopefully saved by having low housing costs for 7 years.

OP bought half the flat for £625k, so would have expected £200k increase in price - the £200k wasn't the purchase price.

No i used online calculation £200,000 in 2017 is worth £268,876.46 today
But
You would have paid 70k plus in rent .
So zero gain zero loss

Good grief. The more you post the more your diamond shoes are too tight. You have a mortgage-free place to live and the support of family money that you’re paying back at half market rate. Did you want a home or an asset? I’m also a London flat owner (bought with no help because my parents are and have always been poor) and it’s value never even enters my head because every day I’m just thankful to have a secure place to live.

Yes inflation might be that rate but would you have earned £200k if you had invested that money in anything other than the flat. No idea what you paid (guessing it's high based on the increase) but I doubt you could make £200k on interest or investments. Also, you would have had to pay for somewhere to live!
I don't blame you being gutted it hasn't gone up but I think you're in a pretty good position so maybe focus on that!

Its your home, not an investment.

If you want a final bit of good news, my guess is the price differential between leasehold flats and freehold houses has further increased over the time period so limiting moving up opportunities.

I think this is also the case

So you could have invested the money and made 200k

but then you’d have to pay for somewhere to live for 8 years. That’s about 200k right?

You are lucky not to be in negative equity which happened to lots of us buying our first properties in the early 1990s.

Mortgage rules are somewhat tighter now so less likely for that to happen.

If the service charge is 4K per year then over that time you would have paid 32K in service charges, plus any other maintenance and lease extension charges.

If you sell it and move to a new place of similar costs you will have to pay a whack in stamp duty. Did you pay stamp duty on this as a FTB ?

Tell me there is no more money in houses any more without telling me there is no more money in houses any more.

If you want a final bit of good news, my guess is the price differential between leasehold flats and freehold houses has further increased over the time period so limiting moving up opportunities.

I doubt there will be any huge drops, but it isn’t going to surge again either. Stagnation time.

this, interest rates are also making a big difference.

Bought a one bedroom house in 1990 for £58K. Had a baby in 1994, intending to move soon after. Roll forward to 1997 and we sold for £48,000, a loss of 17%.. We had to save the short fall, save a deposit again as ours had been used to offset high interest rates. Ok the figures are lower than today but so were wages. That's negative equity.

You've had a nice home. That's what matters.

On the positive side you still got to live somewhere at a pretty low cost compared to renting at a time when your income was low. Now you have a large deposit to put down on something else.
It’s unlikely you would have kept up with inflation through any other means, low risk investments had low rates for the majority of that time and higher risk stocks have tanked more than once.

You are lucky not to be in negative equity which happened to lots of us buying our first properties in the early 1990s.

I bought a house in 2016 for 920k. The inflation calculation shows it should be worth £1.24 million now. There’s no way we would get that for it. The most that a house on our streets has sold for is £1.04 million and that was in 2023 when the market was more buoyant.

I don’t think this is accurate for London at all. There is a huge price difference between a 2 bedroom flat and a 2.5 terraced house in most areas of london. Even many high household incomes can’t sustain the 40% increase. You’re talking a 150k household income plus family money to buy a terrace even in a shitty part of London.

People are moving to outer boroughs to buy a house & skip the flat stage or moving to other cities.

I wouldn’t wait and hope it goes up. The London boom has been and gone. Covid meant a lot of people wanted to get out. I doubt there will be any huge drops, but it isn’t going to surge again either. Stagnation time.

I don't think anyone's denying that your £625k would have bought more goods and services in 2017 than it would now, or saying that you are not worse off in real terms than you were then. I think people are arguing that you are not worse off now than you would have been if you'd invested the money instead of buying the flat. Because of the cost of rent, and because your investments could have gone down as well as up.

This as well.

The high service charge is an issue particularly as it includes communal heating.

I don't think house proces have risen as quickly as inflation

For many they really haven't. 1m in 2020 needs to be 1.25m today

Get another valuation, this sounds nuts.

I know lots of flats where this is the case.

House prices are not included in the 'basket of goods' used for measuring inflation (Consumer Price Index), so I'm struggling to understand why you think your house should have kept pace with inflation? It's entirely feasible that inflation could be at 8%, whilst house prices fall by 5%.