AIBU to ask why so many £1m houses....

It’s certainly a factor if you can’t afford to change it quickly. Our kitchen was changed 5 years after we bought as we couldn’t afford to do it before. It needed to be ok in the interim.

Do you really buy a house for the bathroom or kitchen? I prefer to rip them out and put my own in.

I’m not sure where I said ‘houses should be kept in the latest fashion’

One of our neighbours renovated and put in an open plan kitchen and in doing so lost a bedroom (large bungalow). It cost a fortune and they lost 25% of the pre-renovated asking price. And a friend of mine had a nice Victorian in London. Circa £3 mill at the time. She turned the ground floor into a sort of atrium with the second floor a sort of mezzanine affair. Two years later they couldn;t sell it at £1.2 million.

Like I said upthread. The OP thinks that having a million pound home means you have mega disposable bucks to spend. We have had our house coming on to 45 plus years. It's worth a million now and we are living off savings and DH's state pension. We are SORN-ing our car because we can't afford what it will cost to get it to pass an MOT.

I’m assuming you are looking at family houses?

For any property the top determinant of price is location, secondarily size of plot, then size of house.

When you say “needs” updating do you mean problems with the fabric which will need remediating eg no central heating, 100 year old neglected windows falling out or do you mean “updating in line with current trends”. The latter is entirely a personal choice. I declined to follow the fad for fully open plan downstairs just to follow fashions. Its my home, I have it how I want it. And of course if I’d wasted money ensuring my own home was fully in sync with the latest fads I’d now be putting the walls back in as open plan is out of fashion.

If you are buying a family home to live in long time you will end up redecorating, changing kitchens and bathrooms whatever the state when you buy it.

Buy the location and the plot and you can do the rest over time.

You think people should keep their house in the latest fashion so that a future owner doesn’t have to redecorate?

Good grief.

The children of said owners can sell it as a doer upper. If a house is genuinely derelict the council will sometimes take action (I’ve seen this happen relatively recently).

Absolutely. My parents moved into their then new build in 1983. They changed the kitchen and bathroom once in around 2005, and, with them now in their 70's, they don't expect to have to change it again in their lifetime.

Older owners is more likely.

Boo fucking hoo. It's not the task of sellers to make the buyers' life a breeze. You get what you are willing to pay. End of.

I've heard this ridiculous piss and moan about, and it usually is, Boomers only thinking of themselves and the hose they live in. The cheek!

Because the people who live there bought it 50 years ago for 20k. They don't have much money now and maybe are only living on a state pension. So they can't afford to do up their house.

They didn't choose for it to be worth 1m now. So they were just normal middle or working class people. They might have bought the place off the council.

Our house is probably worth that (4 bed, home counties). The kitchen was done in about 2006, one of the bathrooms before that. The windows are at least 30 years old & the electrics are older than that. We may move in the next few years, so the price will reflect that. We'll probably have to get a new boiler in the next year or so (current one is 25 years old) but why would we spend money on things that will date quite quickly anyway, or we don't get a return on? It's only that sort of value because of where it is, it's not a big swanky house.

£1m isn’t a special figure where something changes, value is a sliding scale. If a house would be worth £2m once in perfect condition, but isn’t in perfect condition, it’d list for £1.6 for example. No reason a house listed for £1m needs to be perfect?

I mean if you have a budget of £1m updating the bathrooms and kitchens is a relatively easy thing you can do. Changing the location is obviously impossible, very unlikely and expensive to buy an adjoining plot of land, and extending the house size or demolishing it and starting again would be more expensive than updating the bathrooms and kitchen. So it's relatively an easier change to make and so doesn't have a significant impact on the cost of houses worth £1m and over

@Locationvshousevsgarden I’m in one of the situations you described. Now ex DH and I bought our house 20 years ago and completely did it up. We had 2 DCs, their Dad turned out to be a complete twat and we split up. That was 16 years ago now. My house is worth over 1 million but I have earned just about enough to support my family on one salary all these years with nothing left over for all but v minor improvements. I’d give anything to have my dream kitchen!

Everything now is 20 years old and I have no money to do anything!

Where I live (deprived area of the north) a million would get you a 5/6 bed house. Beautifully done with a decent amount of land.

Absolutely. Having the newest kitchen on a shitty road is no flex.

Buy quality stuff to last, and don’t redecorate every five mins. Would rather a solid bit of furniture that lasts the rest of time than the newest trend in B&Q wallpaper….

These days, £1m houses are commonplace in south of England. More houses at £2m+

We did our kitchen properly after a stop gap one for 20 years! I'm still quite excited about it. DH, aged 55, says it's the only one he will ever do.

Our Boomer parents, both stretched themselves to buy and then fitted kitchens and bathrooms from their then current income.
I do remember going to a few london houses in the 2000s and seeing amazing new professionally fitted kitchens and bathrooms at newly bought homes. The reasoning being that the 30 something couples had not overstretched to buy (memories of negative equity still around) but had added the cost of new stuff to the mortgage.
The bathrooms are still amazing in my memory!!

This is a really confusing attitude. At any price point, you need to look at what similar houses in the area go for - so a £5 million house is a steal on a street with similar £8 million houses; as is a £300k house on a street with £500k houses.
when we came to sell our house at a similar price point our estate agent said not to bother updating the couple of rooms which were still tired (incl the kitchen) - most people want to do it themselves anyway and what’s a lovely style to you won’t be for them

Well- our house is in theory a million pound house. So we are asset rich and cash poor. We can't afford to do our kitchen up. Tradespeople come in, see the house and the quotes go mental. We were quoted (for example) £250 k to change our little lean-to into a glass lean-to.

What people forget, and what governments seem to forget, is that if you have a house in The South the 'value' might be big, but you may not have an income that meets it. DH's job was lost in December. Mine was lost in April. Even when we had jobs our total household income was under £60k. But he bought his house in 1987. Yet, we are apparently the rich.

@Getamoveon2024 and @Normallyinthepool here we go, a lovely long pdf link for you to read looking at the environmental impact of regular kitchen updates. Suffice to say it does indeed have a massive negative impact on CO2 emissions.

<a class="break-all" href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1596359/FULLTEXT01.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiqvoW42KaVAxUkWkEAHatdAIwQFnoECFAQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3U_x4GgzLowTwXQtD7BrvB" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linky link

I’m with the OP here. It is one of my pet peeves. It’s not just about decor, it’s the lack of financial planning and lack of realisation that others pay the price. For example, the family next door whose property value is undermined because the property looks half derelict. It’s the children of said owners who have to stump up for new windows or pay the plumber because, instead of setting aside the tax free lump sum pension, the owners have spent it all. It’s the taxpayer when old electrics start a fire, thus putting lives at risk.

We just got a valuation for MIL’s house of £4.8M.
As far as she is concerned it is in ‘move straight in’ order. As in, the 90’s style kitchen and tired bathrooms work just fine. She would never consider renovating them. Obviously, whoever buys it will gut the place before they set foot in it.
That’s an issue between the generations. Many in MIL’s generation expected things to last, not to be trendy and I respect that quite a lot.

There's been very little work published on the environmental impact of changing interiors and the most well publicised seem to focus on quite short term impacts, e.g. I'm sure we've all seen the news reports comparing the environmental impact of fake and real christmas trees. Vinterior regularly cites data saying 22 million pieces of furniture end up in landfill in the UK every year and the average lifespan of flatpack furniture is just 3 years.

However, I did find this study of the environmental impact of updating commercial interiors that showed the environmental impact of regular 10 yearly updates is greater than the impact of building the building in the first place.

Like many of the previous posts, we have lived in our house for years and we extended and renovated completely when we moved in. It's now not quite worth £1M, but anyone like you looking to buy it would want to renew everything. I think the issue in your opening sentence is "need". If people are comfortably living in those houses clearly they don't need a new kitchen it's just it has a layout or aesthetic you don't like and quite possibly looks a bit tatty. Replacing ours with a similar quality kitchen would take most of our net income for one year, so that seems both ridiculous and as @Normallyinthepool is discussing, very wasteful environmentally. OP, would be interesting for you to work out how much a new kitchen and bathroom and decorating throughout cost, and then see how often you can do that on your own income? Remember the kitchen and bathroom invariably come with electric and plumbing works, plus new flooring, so adding a lot to the cost. Then decide if you would or should be prioritising that against pension payments, cars and holidays, or building up savings in case of redundancy.