Was central london affordable (ish) to live in in the 1990s?

[Theendofspring]

And when did it become completely unaffordable and the rougher areas gentrified a bit? Reading a book which got me wondering.

It was better early 90s CaptainMyCaptain, particularly the streets either side of Church Street, lots of middle class families. Not like it is now but still reasonably aspirational.

My first flat in London was a one-bedroom flat in Docklands, which cost £40,000 in 1994 and sold for £79,000 in 1997.

My second one was a two bedroom penthouse by Canary Wharf, which cost £140,000 in 1997 and sold for £250,000 in 1999.

I then moved around for a while, while renting, and started over again in 2010, when a three bedroom flat in the middle of Canary Wharf cost me just over £1m.

So I’d say it got quite expensive in the 2000s.

I bought a 1 bed flat in WC1 for £250k in about 2006. ExH and I were on around £60k joint income then. No way would that happen now!!! Similar flat are approx £850k now.

Yes, very affordable. Bought a lovely Victorian conversion two bed flat in Walthamstow in 95 for 58k. Opposite a park, leafy street, enclosed garden, 20 minutes to central London. Goodness knows what it’d sell for now.

Yes Hugh grant and Rhys ifans managed to rent/buy(??) a flat/house in Notting Hill on the proceeds of selling 2 books a week! And they could afford coffees as well!🤣🤣

Zone 2, 2 bed Victorian flat in 1998 was £63 k. We'd been renting it and got it slightly cheap but only by a couple grand. Then it rocketed and 7.5 years later we sold it for £240 and moved out of London as we could never have afforded a house there and we were desperate for a garden. That flat did us very well. Worth about £450k+ now.

West/North central London was unaffordable to most in the 90s but east/south central was very affordable. I wouldn’t have wanted to live there then though! Too much mugging.

We rented a lovely 1bedder in middle of Highgate village for £750 a month in 1995

Parts, yes. No more or less than many other parts of the city. Sold up years ago and was pretty delighted for what we got for it.

Not London, but we bought a terraced house in Chesham in 1999 for £100k. Did a side return extension and loft conversion and sold it in 2006 for £250k.

Seems unbelievable now that I didn’t think much of it, at the time.

Our old landlord bought the flat we used to live in (big 2 bed in Islington) in the mid-90s for 80k (so he told us). It would be worth at least £700,000 now. But we all know it’s really about how much money you spend in avacados and coffee, yeah?

I rented in the 90s with a friend. Rather down at heel 2-bed 3rd floor flat in a nice zone 1 area (with a key to a garden square): 800 a month (so 400 each). Before that, similar for slightly nicer (but smaller) flat in not very nice area in zone 2.

I lived next to Paddington station when I was a student in 1997 😯. Can’t imagine any student being able to afford that now!

It was a 1 bed that a friend and I shared. It was huge and my bedroom was in the lounge.

Friends bought a decent 3 bed in Tooting for 90k in the mid 90s. It would be 10x that now.

Not London but close. I bought a three bed terrace in St Albans in 1994 for £78.5k and sold it two years later for £87,750. Zoopla reckons it’s now worth £600k. Crazy. It’s a three bed terrace with no off road parking.

To illustrate the massive disparity in increase compared to the rest of the country, we bought a 2 bed terrace in Leeds in 1995 for £32k. It's now worth around £150k.

A 3 bed semi in a similar area (nice but not Mumsnet nice, the sort of area you might look at when you can't afford Horsforth or Chapel A or would prefer not to deal with the traffic if you need regular motorway access) would have been around £50-60k at the time and now around £250k.

Whereas London prices then would have been around double Leeds prices but are now more like 5-10 times more, so they've accelerated away disproportionately.

I think there was a lot of growth in London when there was price stagnation in the rest of the country, ie slower to increase again after the 2007 crash.

Here prices have only got back up past those levels in the last 3 years ish, whereas in London there seems to have been a lot of growth in the early 2010s.

But obviously deposits are much more of an issue these days. Pre 2007 100% mortgages were widely available for first time buyers or 5% max. Our deposit was £1600 and our mortgage gave us cashback that just about covered the fees.

Now, people often need higher percentage deposits, especially if they don't meet income multiples.

Stamp duty is probably also more. In the mid 90s you didn't pay any below £60k. I don't know what stamp duty is now, but if someone is buying a property that is modest by London standards, say £500k or so, they probably need a £25-50k deposit as a minimum, plus stamp duty and fees could make it more like £60-100k, or more if you are stretching the income multiple.

There was the dot.com boom and the banking boom in the late 90s and early 2000s. I remember buying and selling shares and people making lots of money inIT companies.
This would affect London rather than the rest of the country. Labour opened up the country to more immigration around 2003.
This is when the rest of the country got left behind.

It really wasn’t. My brother bought his mansion flat in Bayswater for £60k in 1992

You need the context of the London population. Inner London lost a large chunk of population in WWII and people kept on leaving in the fifties, sixties and seventies. In 1981 it was half what it was in 1931. The population increased slowly again during the eighties and nineties but there was still a lot of slack in the housing stock
which kept it affordable. The rate of population growth trebled after 2001.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London

I remember my friend buying her flat in Clapham for 24k in about 1991, it was a tiny 1 bed one with a very tiny courtyard garden. For context I had bought a flat on the South coast at a similar time for 26k but it was a very lovely huge apartment on the most desirable road in town.

I bought a huge one-bed in Bayswater in about ‘94. It cost 65k

It depends what you call affordable. I couldn't have bought that on a teachers' salary which is why I had to move North.