Getting rich in the early 80s through property? How common?

[PinkPanther57]

How easy was it for a working class, uneducated but very street smart man to get become seriously rich via property deals in the early/mid 80s?

Mainly in London, working way up from the bottom and becoming a multi, multi millionaire within 5 years?

Would you suspect foul play or dodgy deals of some sort? How many legitimate multi millionaires were created around then through property deals?

Well the early 80s were too early for the housing boom. You didn’t make that much money on London property until the booms of the late 90s/ 2000s. Certainly not millions, as very few properties in London were worth millions then.

Depends what they were doing though I guess. Not sure there was too much dodge either to be fair though

Thanks, thinking: 81-87.

Probably 1984-1986 in the main.

I know someone who bought their council flat for £4k when right to buy started. It was just off Piccadilly Circus. Sold for a few million a few decades later.

To clarify, I mean rich enough to buy multiple classic sports cars, houses in SW1 and SW3, to garner than kind of purchasing power when you've had no money to start with. All via property deals.

Thanks, Millie, wow.

I mean how probable was it to get really rich, really 'quick' over 5 years or so in the 80s.

That’s quite amazing, they must’ve bought it in 1935 or something
Never heard of a council flat near Piccadilly selling for millions. They don’t even sell for that now. Ie Vale Royal House, 36 Newport Court, London, WC2H
www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-63648201.html

My parents bought their flat (sort of house- hard to explain- 2 bedrooms) in sw1 for £50k in the 1940s. Sold it in early 2000s for £385k. Obviously an enourmous amount of money but that’s the sort of profit people were making. Not millions unless the property had always been very expensive

I'd say it was entirely possible. You only needed to make a good profit on a couple, great on the next and catapult to a significantly higher one then you're off.

Extremely common, urgh. Everyone knows the very best types inherit their wealth. Preferably along with their country pile where the family has lived since the 1300s.

I knew someone who bought a new build in the south east in the mid 80s which rose in value by 1/3 in 18 months, so there was money to be made. Lots of people ended up over-stretching and being crippled by 15% interest rates and negative equity not long after that though.

Oh wait.

I know many did well via property in 80s but as someone said boom was much later (I had thought) and generating huge wealth, as opposed to doing well and making money via property has to have been very unusual? (But happy to stand corrected).

Probably much easier to launder money back then too.

I agree laundering was easier but you didn’t really need to when property prices weren’t as high.

A lot more in the way of dodgy commercial property- nightclubs etc. God soho used to be gangsters paradise

Commerical property was comparatively much cheaper then you mean?

no it was more dodgy and more of it. All owned by corporations now but it wasn’t back then. You could make money off the businesses or rents, less so the buying and selling of it

I think a bullish person could have made a lot of money by buying and selling houses in London in the 80s. Our first house was a tiny 3 bed terraced house which we bought from a builder. He'd bought it from the executors of a very old lady who'd lived there for decades. He'd done a quick refurb and I assume made a good little profit in the space of a few months. That was 1986. Work involved, yes, but there were plenty of rundown properties around and lots of demand from people like us.

Does the person you mention have a sideline in legal substances, I am told that is where money is to be made. As long as you don’t mind dealing with the various mafias.

Interesting, probably money in converting central London houses into flats etc too. Lots of profit, if done cheaply, I would think.

I know someone who bought a 4 bed Georgian house in Peckham, for £5k. I think this was late 60s/early 70s though.

Her mother had urged her to buy it the previous year - when the price was £2500! It's not just lately that prices have zoomed up.

I dare say it would have needed a hell of a lot,of work/updating, though - as masses of period houses did before they became fashionable - or 'sort after' as so many estate agents like to spell it.

There was more flexibility re: buying with a mortgage, I think, you could negotiate when you completed, you could complete when you could afford to?

Why the curiosity? Are you trying to figure out how someone you know made money?

Something like that, wondering if any scams going on circa 84-86.

Super amazing wealth from zip is fortunate but maybe, suspicious. You usually need some money to make money.

Don't know about that. We saw the place nearly four months before we moved in and as we were first time buyers and buying from a builder it's mysterious why it took so long to do the survey and legal stuff. Christmas intervened, but it still seemed to take an age. Our buyer was extremely keen to get it all done, as were we. The basic process in England was identical to now - get a mortgage offer in principle, find a property, put in an offer subject to survey, offer gets accepted, survey done, possibly a bit of negotiating over the price in the light of what it says, mortgage offer confirmed, legal searches done, date agreed for exchange of contracts, exchange, completion, move in.

I think there was a way to buy, back in 80s, where you could delay until you had the cash.

For ordinary people, it was harder to get a mortgage then than in the late 80s/early 90s. Until Mrs Thatcher deregulated mortgages, they mostly came from buildingsocieties, very few from banks. Building societies were mutual organisations owned by their members, who were the savers and borrowers. They didn't make a profit. They required borrowers to save with them for a year or two to build up the deposit, which had to be something like 5% or 10%. The amount you could borrow was a multiple of your earnings - 3 times, typically, for a single person, or 2.5 times joint income for a couple (or 3 x the higher income and a smaller multiple of the lower income).

I'd imagine, though, that the Arthur Daley types who were making money would have had ways round all that. Plenty of ways to make money with all the nationalised industries being sold off, too - shares were marketed to the general public. British Gas, British Telecom are the ones I remember.

Council houses too, of course. Sitting tenants were able to buy them at a huge discount and after a certain time (two years?) could sell them for market value and pocket the difference. (No replacement council houses built, of course.)

Then she came for the building societies. When mortgages were deregulated most building societies ended up being bought up by banks (or vice versa). Bonanza time for the members, who became shareholders, and for the directors, whose salaries rocketed (share options too). Dreadful consequences for the housing market, though, as we are seeing all too clearly now.

There was a big crash in house prices in 1989 which lasted for several years. It followed the abolition of tax relief on mortgage interest for unmarried couples and then later altogether. Lots of people were in negative equity for years in London.