To wonder how the next generation will afford a house?

[Housepricewoes]

DH and I want to move to what will hopefully be our family home, in 2 years. Work commitments means we can't do it sooner but I'm stressing about how much house prices might rise in that time.

That got me thinking about how today's children will ever be able to buy a home.

I know it's a very British thing to aspire to home ownership but rightly or wrongly it is the norm.

Many of my friends and extended family have only been able to get on the property ladder with a significant hand out from the bank of mum and dad, but unless their circumstances drastically change, they are not going to be in a position to do the same for their children.

What do you think will happen about houses with the next generation?

Jesus they are expensive flats then. We put 20% deposit down on ours (bought 2years ago) and that was 32k

NoArmani - did your parents offer you that money or did you ask? Was it a gift rather than a loan?

10k was from a trust fund they started when I was a kid and 15k was a gift

Thanks NoArmani. I wonder why some parents give money gifts like that but not others. Mine could afford to I think but wouldn't and DH's can't afford to but I think they would...

Even if we save £1,000 a month it will take several years but prices will have gone up considerably by then... Hm. Maybe we should just stop worrying about buying.

Yes - there are the essential jobs that any community needs to survive, but not enough of them to replace those lost in fishing and farming. (I'm talking about the North Coast.) And arguably without the seasonal influx, some of these would have disappeared by now, because the year-round population is v small. (There are some very deprived areas around the clay mines, for example, where the scenery doesn't attract holidaymakers. Same sort of problems as ex pit villages in Yorkshire and N.E.) Most are in some way connected to tourism, even if it's gardening or cleaning of holiday homes. Without holiday lets these jobs wouldn't exist.

I don't think prices in the area will ever fall to the level that the ordinary working couple could afford. However, there are now new-build developments that only established locals can buy to help keep the younger generation in the area. I don't know how the finance behind them works. Presumably planning permission was conditional on this? And therefore the price of the land was cheaper.

The govt could do the same by increasing the affordable element in new developments. (Boris reduced it and his idea of affordable is not mine.)

YY to economic activity outside London. A pity that one of the first things the Coalition did was to disband Regional Development Boards.

And for political balance, why on earth didn't Blair reverse Right to Buy and build more houses?

In some senses the ethos behind right to buy was sound, in that it provided stability for families to progress and become self-supporting without enforced disruption, which can reverse progress for families, and make them more likely to depend on the state.

However, they were sold with insufficient restriction (in terms of flogging on at vast profit) and Blair failed, in a big way, to replace the stock.

That is the key issue IMO.

I am sure I have read somewhere Vince Cable saying that policy (Coalition or Lib Dem, not sure which) is now to replace each house sold through right to buy. Does anyone know more about this?

Perhaps Right To Shared Ownership would be better way forward, with restrictions to only sell the property back to the council when enough capital accumulated for a deposit in the private sector.

So what kind of income and savings do you need to buy and renovate this rotting husk? www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-30116556.html

I have to stop myself getting cross at DH's Dad and stepmum who spend thousands on 1st class flights and 6 week holidays when they could have helped us out tons of times in the past.

It's their money I know (why should they give it to us?) but it does get my goat when they also:

1. Talk about how effortlessly loaded they think we are when they have no clue about London prices or the cost of childcare or how hard we work to save
2. Expect us to traipse up to see them loads so they don't have to visit us, when we don't have a car and they do (two in fact), and we have two young kids
3. Offload all their old junk and tat they don't want anymore on the fake premise they are 'helping us out' and then get offended when we don't want all of it (they will bring their Xmas gift cardboard boxes round at Xmas 'for the boys to play in' and get offended when we say 'thanks, but we really don't want them'). Clearly, they want to dispose of the boxes!

Similarly to upthread, my parents would help us out but they can't afford to really. So we've done it ourselves (and so we should maybe) but I do resent DH's dad when he makes 'not like in my day' comments and does low whistles when he sees our house, as if we're rolling in it, when we practically kill ourselves saving and sacrificing (and its pretty modest).

At the end of the day though it does come back to the fact that it's their dough.

Dilys, then my in laws who wonder why we don't just buy a family house and have 3 kids ASAP because they did the same would drive you mad. This is from 2 elderly people who live in a £3.5 million pound house they bought for a tenner when they were our age. Yes they mean well, buy jeez talk about being out of touch with reality!!

I don't think it is, alas. But I'm aware that it's a bit entitled to expect handouts from parents and PIL. Is the 'bank of mum and dad' thing new or did previous generations do the same, does anyone know, out of interest?

Apatite, yes same here. They hear our salaries and think we're minted. DH has explained abut house prices and childcare costs and cost of living and deposit amounts etc etc but they just go 'Really? Are you sure?' and clearly don't believe us. Each time they see us they comment on DH's clothes and say 'That looks new. Designer I suppose?' He gets all his clothes from Primark and Uniqlo!

64 sq m was the size of my first flat velvet - ex council, Parker Morris standard 2 bed. Fine for bringing up 2 dc, both bedrooms were double though it had a small kitchen (not big enough to eat in) but compensated by large living area.

Bloody hell, aga, if I didn't know better I'd say there was a typo on the price- that is scandalous.

Does this look like the home of a lottery winner?

www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/32452778

My proposal was only for London/home counties properties as I really do think Brits are being priced out. My own escape to the very modest country was financed by a cash sale to an oversea BTL investor. That doesn't seem right for an ex-council property somehow - not in an area where parents sleeping on sofabeds in the front room is the norm not the exception.

The West country is fooked! Cornwall needs to join with Wales so at least it won't be the land the NHS forgot, gain some politicl clout and import some high-tec industries sharpish. There was no excuse for the council to take 2 years to recruit an EP recently. Those from Somerset down also need to refuse enmasse to pay any taxation whatsoever until central government addresses the major infrastructure concerns of the region. A county on the western and soggy side of this Island shouldn't have sky high water bills due to leaking pipes, the main train line should have been replaced and moved further inland decades ago and we won't even get into the causes of the recent floods here.

I agree with your proposal bochead. But this is why nothing will change, any proposals that would actually bring house prices down would never be agreed.

Aga my great grandmother had a house like that on a nurse salary and was considered a scruffy part of town!

Although she did rent out rooms in it.

Some while back I saw the stats on home ownership in the UK in 1920. Approx 15% owner-occupiers, the remaining 85% private tenants. The cost of buying a house was well out of reach of the vast majority of families. What happened between then and the 1980s was mass-construction of council housing. This a was for the specific purpose of improving housing standards.

Doubtlessly this caused real damage to the businesses of private landlords by providing better housing at less cost to tenants. This in turn, I'm sure, reduced the cost of buying houses as they became less valuable as income-earning assets.

Since the 1980s this process has been reversed. First councils stopped building new houses and were obliged to sell the ones they had. Then, lending for BTL increased as surely as night follows day. Hey presto prices are going back up. They probably have further to go.

I don't think Thatcher intended this. Her vision, like lots of other Tories, was of a property-owning democracy. It would be nice if the Tories now would admit that things haven't gone as planned and that HTB won't achieve Thatcher's intentions either.

Yes, that 15% tallies with what I thought. A very few owned and the vast majority did not. The issue is what do we want as a nation - that everyone can own or at least have shared ownership when they want it (London is full of 20 somethings who are moving around, sharing with friends, temporarily there and the last thing they want is to have to sort out leaking boilers and be tied to somewhere so it is not the case everyone at all stages of life wants to buy of course).

Families tend to want stability. It is currently legally possible to offer assured shorthold tenancies of longer periods than is the norm. My daughter's tenants are on 14 months and she might well renew another year. In her case (she lives in a friend's place at present as cannot afford to live in her own buy to let) whether she will want her flat back this year or next will depend on things like where else she is living, if she's decided to live alone rather than with friends, how her life and career develops. She is probably not a typical landlord. The more typical one has one buy to let and his or her family home and they have it as an investment so may well be happy with a longer lease as the void empty periods are when you lose money. We could probably do with some research into why landlords and tenants do not currently agree longer leases - some do but not most. is that because the landlords want the ability to get the property sooner eg if they want to sell or move or because the tenants want to move?

Also who are most of the UK private tenants? Are they families or young people? Is there a map which shows proportions of ownership and age of residents available?

Just for balance here is a house for sale no further out than those very expensive £1m ones a bit further up the thread also in outer London £275k www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-42354784.html

Toad - this is the bit I struggle with, the average person on the average wage traditionally didn't own a house, and it was only for a short period, between the large number of council houses being built post war (most not being occupied until mid 50s) until their sell off in the mid 80s, that tenants had secure long term, high quality rentals - people did rent for a long term from the same landlord, but more out of lack of options in many towns (I know my Great, great Grandfather owned all the rental properties in one town, but by the time my great grandmother was born all the money had gone).

It's hard not to say that the last couple of generations have been a blip, so perhaps the answer is to say "the bulk of the next generation won't own a house, at least not those working class" and so look at tenant rights instead.

The solution to problems with housing is still being seen in the Tory mindset of "ownership" - ways to bring down house prices, ways to make it possible for the bulk of society to own. How about just saying, lets have a society where we accept the bulk won't own a property, their is actually enough houses, it's not like after WW2 where there weren't physically enough properties to put all the families in, private or public owned, it's just the ones that are available now are expensive and come with no rights for renters.

Increase renters rights, increase pension provision so large numbers stop thinking of housing as their only investment option. (how many times have I heard someone saying that their big family home "is my pension" or someone with a BTL "to give me a second income in retirement" - there should be easy to understand other investment opportunities if we want to get these people out of the housing market, it's not fair to berate them for wanting to stick with the one form of investment they understand and has a proven track record in their lifetime)

The average person didn't go to Uni either pre-War. Again we are reverting to the historical mean, with the imposition of tuition fees.

Basically a large property owning, well educated middle class in the UK last century was a historical anomaly and it looks to me as if we are just reverting to the historical mean. Even TB and rickets are making a come back in our inner cities.

For most of our great-grand parents, life was an insecure overcrowded one, where if your Landlord or employer found you'd voted in a way contrary to their wishes you could be evicted and sacked on a whim. The fear of the workhouse kept everyone in line. The fear of an impoverished old age was real and constant. This included very skilled workers who had completed 7 year apprenticeships that were far more demanding both academically and practically than those we have today.

As a society we have to decide a common way forward. Do we really want our grandchildren to grow up in a world as bleak as that of our great- grandparents?