If you own a home £700k +, what do you do?

[Littlebrownshoes]

Sheer noseyness is all this is!

We live in a 'nice area' - somewhere that homes typically sell 15 to 20% over the home report as standard. Between myself and my partner, we earn a decent amount, not well off or middle class by any means but bring in slightly over 100k between us.

Our home is worth 260k approx and although we would like something bigger, I don't see how we could afford anything else, any time soon.

It gets me thinking regularly, if we would struggle to buy a home even 50k more expensive, what kind of money must be ploughed in to these massive homes you see? I'm talking 5+ bedrooms and upward of 700k types.

If you live in a home like this, what is your household income and what type of job(s) do you have, if you don't mind sharing?

We bought at £780K this year - 4-bed Semi in pleasant South Eastern town, commutable distance to London.

We both work in tech (Director+ roles) and our household income is around £200K.

We're not strapped for cash, but interest rates being high (plus utilities and general cost of living) we definitely have much less disposable income than a few years ago.

We are in the process of buying a £700k house although we got it for £655k

We have just sold out house and are downsizing. We bought our current house for £925k 15 years ago and are now able to buy the new one for cash.

Dh owns his own recruitment business and I'm a sahm.

Apparently I primarily wank about on MN.

Difficult to value our house accurately, but probably worth £800k or so (Zoopla says much more but I don't believe it). Detached four bed West of London in a flood risk area so that limits the appeal - although we do have our own mooring.
Bought over 25 years ago for 250k.
Have worked in IT/Business change for ever.

Not what you asked but we have similar income to you and our house is worth £500k with a £350k mortgage and financially we feel pretty comfortable, so I think you would be able to upsize if you really wanted to.

This is what I was thinking. 🤔 A 5 bed house where we love in London would be at least £4 million.

I don’t think many people who start off with a 10% deposit on a £250,000 house are then quickly (7 years, say) upsizing to a £750,000 house with a ‘normal’ job.

I could foresee us ending up in a similar priced house but we bought our first house off the back of a £50k inheritance and then made another £50k in profit when we sold the house 5 years later, giving us over £100k as a deposit for our next house.

Our current house has increased in value by about £50k and that’s not taking into account the work we’ve done to it. Obviously markets fluctuate, but assuming we don’t sell at a terrible time so could ‘easily’ make £75k on this house. Add that to the £100k from house 1 and paying off the mortgage over a few years that puts us at a £200k deposit on house 3.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we (unfortunately) have another £100k in inheritance in the next ten years, which would give us £300k to work with.

Our household income is around £100k/year so we could get a £400k mortgage with a £300k deposit = £700k house.

Lucky with property over the years, 1st house sold for more than 100% buying cost. Household income £150k ish - NHS & Driver.

Lots will have got there due to equity gains, difficult to replicate for younger people.

A 5 bed house where we love in London would be at least £4 million.

yiu just live in a very exclusive part of London!

SAHM.

There are too many moving parts here to generalise... For example we bought our first house 11 years ago in our 20s. Parents gifted us nearly half of the deposit. It was tiny and we were full stretch on the mortgage so it was quite tight. Over several years, salaries increased and the equity increased a lot. So we bought our next house. Salaries and equity still steadily increased and the plan was to buy our next (current house) when we could afford it. However, a much larger than expected work bonus allowed us to buy this house much sooner than expected and we increased the mortgage a bit to do so. Gifted deposit, salary, equity, and cash/bonus - we couldn't have bought this house unless all of those things happened as first time or relatively new home owners, even with our current income. Every story and set of circumstances is different.

What on earth are you spending your money on - £6000 a month between you should go pretty far!

Depending on pension contributions and if they have student loans still, it could well be closer to £5000 a month.

But depressing isn’t it… mainly due to equity gains. Can’t really go on without generations being saddled with debt.

Our income is roughly the same. No inheritance here (nor will there be). But we bought over twenty years ago and have always overpaid on our mortgage until now and have worked our way gradually up to a property that’s worth around £600k now - but this is us maxed out financially if we don’t want to start sacrificing other things to manage.

Buying a house in my twenties and then ageing 20 years worked for me!
Property ownership is pretty unfair

This is so so dependant on a lot of factors. Our house is worth 650 ish so less than what you're asking for but close enough.

It's a 4 bed detached with a an average sized garden and a double garage. I love it but it really is nothing absolutely WOW. And I'm in the south east so the same house would be a lot less up north

We moved to London and could just afford a tiny house. Later with a small legacy we bought a buy to let, then because values were going up on our London house we bought another.
We retired sold up and bought a big house for the big garden. We bought and price went up into your bracket. It has dropped a little but if we sold now we would have the 'illusion' of a 'profit'. after 4 years.

It is an OK house in a good neighbourhood. Better than a good house in a marginal postcode.

We bought our Edwardian terrace 27 years ago for £81k, it’s now worth £700k app. North West England, both now retired. Just lucky to have been able to buy at the right time.

We bought (21 years ago) our marital home for £1.25m. My husband was managing partner of London branch of an international law firm.

Our house was £675k when we bought it in 2017 - 3 bed mid-terrace on an unusual street in SW London. We think if we put it on the market now, it would go for £950-1m. I'm a lawyer, senior (C-suite), DH was a journalist alongside a SAHD for years and now works school for a friend's business doing whatever's needed.

Bought for £900k two years ago. Joint income of £145k, public sector and insurance.

Mainly we bought for the first time very young with a 100% mortgage (£60k) - actually it might have been 105% to get furniture etc, and then have upgraded a few times.

Also flat one to current house took twenty years, and lots of overpaying etc. But not very helpful when you can't go back in time twenty years! But that might be the kind of timescale you need.

Think joint income was about £25k when we bought the flat so also the increases there have helped!