£450,000 for a tiny 2 bed in Brixton

[TheBogQueen]

I left London 10 years.

Holy moly I cannot believe the prices in 'trendy' and 'up and coming Croydon

Croydon???? (Yes I'm watching location)

Brixton is bloody great. I had to move away from there at the beginning of the year and it broke my heart. But our landlord increased the rent by a stupid amount and we just couldn't afford it. But people will pay it. Everyone wants to live in Brixton now it would seem, when I moved there 7 years ago it was a well-kept secret with a bad rep!
I now live in a damp shoebox in Zone 4. I want to get out of London in the next 18 months. It is place for the rich now in my opinion, not humble public sector workers like DP and I.

We moved out of London recently when the birth of DS meant we didn't have two salaries coming in anymore. Even before DS we were paying so much in rent that we couldn't afford to do or see any of the wonderful things that London has to offer. So we thought, what's the point?

I like Brixton for a night out but wouldn't want to live there. Lots of drugs, which means lots of crime, which means sky high insurance.

Respectable zone 6 = Kingston upon Thames

I lived in London for years and loved it. We were living between Brixton and Norwood when we decided to buy.

Worked out the only area we could afford to buy something that might do for a small, young family was... Catford.

We moved out to the commuter belt

But I do wonder how on earth young people are managing to buy nowadays if they need to be near London for work. On two normal but ok salaries, we only just managed a £250,000 mortgage (and that was with help with the deposit) which 3 years ago was just enough to buy a 3-bed with a garden in a nice town. Thank Christ we did it then, as the same houses are now going for around £320,000.

Thurlow, I wonder too.

a mortgage of three and a half times my salary gave me a lot of choice in London when I started looking at properties in 1998

Today my house is worth 12 and a half times my salary.

Why did nobody mention the fact that the flat below the half million Brixton flat they bought didn't even have curtains?! And that none of their soon to be neighbours hasn't been arsed to cut the grass in years? For half a million I certainly wouldn't want to live above what was quite possibly a squat.

good on you Splendide, thats great. Same thing with dh, bought a good three bed house (not in London or surrounding areas) in 1999 for £73k, he paid off the mortgage fast, and sold it for £150k 9 years ago.

I didn't know Kingston was zone 6, I loved Kingston.

I know, nancy. I guess most Londoners must just be paid extravagant salaries. But there are also so many people who work in normal jobs and perhaps have a joint income of £60-£70k. What does that get you? Just, just about enough to spend £250k. Which buys you very little in London.

I definitely put on rose tinted specs while I lived there so that I could tolerate being verbally (and once physically) abused by drunks and crackheads on public transport, the dirt, the lack of green spaces, the run down housing stock, need I go on.

I'll ddd the huge number of prostitutes and poverty there. There's a handful of trendy bars and restaurants which has what's changed since you lived there and the transport links are superb but for what you get for your money the area is grossly overrated. I don't understand why people would choose to bring up their families there if they could afford somewhere better.

I left London for the US eleven years ago. At the time, when renting, you tried to avoid Peckham, Elephant & Castle, Tottenham and the area around Green Lanes. When I moved to London in 1998, the Isle of Dogs was the up-and-coming place, with reasonably-priced rooms for rent, and perhaps one okay-ish bar in the area. I bet 500k-1m flats are the norm now in those places.

"Not everyone wants or needs a kitchen"

Are you actually serious?

Yes, kind of. Between the ages of 18 and 28 I mostly used my kitchen for making a cup of tea, having breakfast and chilling wine. You don't need a proper kitchen for that. I lived for 6 years with an open plan reception where the kitchen was in the corner of the reception - just like many people in London do. If you are childfree, are building your career and eat out a lot you don't need much of a kitchen. I get this is heresy but the Cult of the Big Eat-In Kitchen is really a new phenomenon, and only really relevant to dinner party obsessives or those with children at home.

There are so many lovely towns and cities that aren't London though - it's not suburbia or London only. We just bought a massive 3 bed Edinburgh tenement (with a pantry and utility rooms and all sorts of inbuilt storage) for 200k. I'm so glad I left tooting!

Actually I know what you mean, Tondelayo. It's not not needing a kitchen, it's not needing a "proper" kitchen in a separate room or space for a big dining table. We always lived in shared house so we had a proper kitchen, but if it had just been me than a reception room with a few cupboards, a fridge, a crappy cooker and about 3 inches of worktop in the corner of the living room would have been fine. We saw plenty of places like that when looking at flats.

Agree that a lot of 20-somethings will be fine with a teeny wee kitchenette because they aren't cooking anything much more exciting than pasta or stir-fry.

Ha ha StopGap. I moved out of Brixton/Herne Hill in '98. I couldn't afford to buy there on my first job salary. Ended up buying in Tottenham. Out of the frying pan...

But that's still a kitchen, even if it isn't a separate room!!

I also think for half a million quid no matter what your own personal needs or wants in terms of kitchen space 'a few cupboards, a fridge, a crappy cooker and about 3 inches of worktop in the corner of the living room would have been fine' is shit value for money within a wider market context.

I guess what gets me shaking my head about this is not so much the individual decisions about where to live, because of course everyone wants different things out of their homes, it's the blind acceptance that this is just how much it costs, and that needing a 40 year, interest only mortgage to get it is not an issue, because the bet is that housing will always go up.

And btw I'm using Thurlow's description because it's nice and concise rather than because she's suggesting that this would be great value for money.

Yeah that's what I mean Thurlow. You need a heat source, a sink and a work surface to make dinner. I know people who have kids and host a lot of dinner parties with a small strip of a kitchen. The only issue is that your kitchen area needs to comply with building regs.

What bemuses me is the people who say "I don't understand why people waste their money on property in London when they could buy a 4 bedroomed place in X with a double garage" - presumably to then waste money on furnishing, heating and cleaning space they don't need, filling up their double garage with cars that depreciate, and then needing to buy 5 figure annual season tickets that increase in cost every year.

The thing about London living is that it does make you prioritise and also maximise you do have - instead of filling up space with crap you don't need.

I'm talking about those who have the privilege of choosing between buying a house in the burbs or a flat in zone 2 btw. The lack of affordable housing in London for most people is disgraceful.

I cook and bake just fine in a typical London flat kitchen within an open plan room. Admittedly I don't run to a huge store of food but shops are right on the doorstep. It's just a different way of cooking/eating. In a country house I'd have a freezer full of seasonal stuff, a larder ready for whatever I fancied cooking and an array of different gadgets, baking and serving dishes. We eat just as well in London, but it is a more expensive way.

And being forced not to have so much stuff is liberating.

But London prices are crazy, one of my DC needs to live there (work) and it is seriously depressing to wonder how he will raise a family somewhere pleasant with good schools without a soul-grinding commute.

Greengrow and Aeroflot, house prices even in Edgware are insane, 3 bed semi's in nice roads needing completely gutting are over £500k and in good condition are on at over £650k. You would struggle to get anything detached under £700k for something needing work and a 4 bed 1 bath will tip over £800k with plenty £1m+, even Borehamwood is becoming out of the reach of first time buyers and people are moving out towards Hatfield in the hope of being able to afford something. I had a flat in West Hampstead which I bought in 1997 for 90k, unfortunately although I sold at a big profit I wish I had held on to it as it was recently on the market for £620k.

Oh, don't get me wrong, for half a million I'd want a proper kitchen even if I didn't use it!

It's true that not everyone needs the same thing. Probably an inherent MN bias as many of the posters have or have had or are planning to have DC, which changes your housing requirements.

99.9 % of the population definitely do not cook every night,I certainly didn't when I was working full time in London and I wasn't unusual in that at all. I grabbed something at lunch time and then in the evening just had a snack. My kitchen was tiny, in fact my utility room now is probably 3x the size of my old kitchen I only wanted a bigger kitchen when ds was born.

Thus is true
When DP and I were young in London we are put around 3 times a week Snd were otherwise working g late etc