AIBU to be gutted my house has lost me money?

The obvious question is did you overpay in the first place?

It's a bitter pill to swallow as so many have seen years of exponential growth but flats purchased post Brexit really have suffered in many parts of London.

I don't think things will change, well maybe in decades but contrary to what the message has been affordability does matter even in London & without huge equity gains it's very hard to keep funding ever increasing house purchases when wages have also stagnated for years.

It sounds like it could have been a new build? This happened to me 15 years ago but on a slightly smaller scale.

Have you thought about getting a BTL mortgage on it to release some funds, renting it out, then using the released funds as a deposit on your new place?

I don't know how the numbers would work for you without variables like rental value and so on, but it's just an idea.

You can't think about the inflation gain without taking into account the interest you would have paid on a mortgage.

If the mortgage interest would have been lower than a savings rate over that time then that's just a lesson to be learnt

If the bread was still the same price, and inflation was zero - then you’d not have lost any money

That’s not how inflation works

if you purchased a house in 2017 for £200k and now can sell it for £200k but in 2017 a loaf of bread was £2.50 and now a loaf of bread cost £4 - you literally can’t buy as many loaves as f bread - as inflation has increased prices

Well, probably not, as you would have been paying rent to live elsewhere. I very much doubt the interest from the investment would have been higher than your rent.

OP, that seems a very low return for a ground floor flat, even for London. Did you buy the flat new? Or from a property developer?

Does it have a short lease or high service charges? A shared freehold?

This is true of course, but I think OP has already factored in inflation to the £200k amount she thinks she ought to have gained anyway. And what people are saying is that she expected to now have (value of flat) + 200k, when she in fact just has (value of flat). However, as she would have likely spent the imaginary £200k on rent, she doesn't now have less money than she would have had if she hadn't bought the flat.

How many years are on the lease as leasehold properties can deppreciate unless you pay the freeholders for a brand new 99 year lease. Is that an option?

If you look at it as a HOME then you havent lost a penny.

House A is worth 100k in 2017
House B is worth 200k in 2017

If house A appreciates by 25% in 8 years then its worth 125k
If house B appreciates by 25% in 8 years then its worth 250k

So to move in the 8 years would cost £25k more if both houses appreciated at 25%.

BUT your estate agent has said your area hasnt appreciated and taking my example house A is still with 100k. Therefore house B hasnt appreciated either and is still worth 200k.

Sounds to me like you were fooled into the idea that property prices always go up.

Statistically there is evidence that it is correct for London still. Rise of WFH, people want space, and with leasehold & service charge issues flats are typically taking a lot longer to sell than they used to, even in London, and are less desirable than they once were.

I'm not sure anything you'd invested in would have kept pace with inflation. Interest rates didn't get up to 11%, and if you'd invested in the stock market you'd have lost a lot of the capital last week. Plus as others have said, if you'd have invested it, where would you have lived? You really can't view your primary home as an investment, it's somewhere to live. If it goes up in value whilst you own it, that's a bonus, but it's not the primary objective of buying a home. We need to get away from this view that property is a guaranteed way to make money.

I wouldn’t wait OP, I would move if that’s right for your lifestyle now and in the future. You could gamble a couple more years and see no growth while the properties you want to buy move out of your reach. Focus on the fact that you haven’t had to pay a mortgage for the last 7.5 years, which probably means you’ve had a good quality of life Living in a flat that you’ve liked. Now it’s time to move on and maybe you have to take on a small mortgage to enable you to do that, you are still in a better position than most people.

edited to ask, did you use the last 7.5 years to save money as you didn’t have a mortgage or rent to pay?

We sold our last house after massive losses in the 1990s property crash had hit the market. The upside was we were moving to a bigger place so the cost of that new place was in that sense proportionately less s in a way you do still win out even if you sell your flat for less as the next place you buy if is more expensive will also usually be less than it would otherwise have been.

Did you use having no mortgage as an opportunity to save a decent amount each month?

If you'd invested it yes it would have maybe gone up more depending on the investment, but you would have had to pay several thousand in rent each month to live in a similar property. Also sounds like maybe you overpaid in 2017, because generally all housing has increased in value in the past 8 years.

Anyway, housing yourself is not an investment generally, yes at times it has been, but also many many people have lost money on housing, and gone into negative equity. If you had put the say £2000/month you saved on rent into an ISA with a 5% return since 2017, you would have £200k today - so there is that too.

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.

You haven’t ‘lost’ money
you bought at a price thinking in a few years time it might possibly double value ( make a huge profit) for you and it hasn’t