The reason young people can't afford to buy houses

[GrabtharsHammer]

Is because they all have iPhones and Sky telly.

So sayeth my mother.

Nothing at all to do with the ridiculous house prices then? They are baby boomers and bought their first house for a few thousand quid on my dads modest salary.

Apparently the youth of today just need to get rid of their gadgets and telly subscriptions and then they will easily afford a deposit and mortgage.

Are everyone's parents this judgemental and out of touch or am I just particularly lucky?

(Fairly lighthearted) AIBU?

User721 I see the SE as one very big expensive area. But the rest of the country as a whole is much bigger than the SE. People do live in other regions.
How far is Luton from London? (Genuine question as my geography is not great). Luton has lots of property that would be affordable on 2 social worker salaries. I'm not saying that people should have to commute that far but I'm guessing that Luton is classed as SE?

dreaming the problem with trying to get businesses to move up north is that companies often want to be near each other.

Getting to meetings are much easier if you are all in/around London. Sticking 5 people in a taxi or on the tube is cheaper and easier than putting them all on a train from god knows where for 2 hrs (plus delays)

Ah but dreamingofsun you are not allowed to suggest that jobs and people should be moved up North. Life is very grim and prospects very low outside of the SE . All those to people who have been forced to move up north to media city must be absolutely livid that they can now afford to buy big houses in good areas should they so desire.

You must be reading this thread very differently to me then six.

The anecdotal evidence on this thread seems to me to be saying that if you live in a very cheap area, you bought at the bottom of the housing crash or you have help off your parents then you can afford a deposit if you live fugaly for a few years, but most people aren't in that position.

Also your view assumes that everybody should be in a couple where both people are working to afford a house. How is this ok? What about people with children or just haven't found the right person yet. If you NEED to be in a couple to afford a house surely this encourages people to jump into buying a house with someone before they are ready or to stay in a couple that might not be healthy.

It is the case that the average age of the first time buyer has increased and that house prices have increased.

But clearly many young people are still affording to buy, and many people do live very frugally in their twenties to save up to buy a house or save money to have children.

it is true that in many areas housing is affordable however it is not in the london area or southeast
the BBC have a thing where can I afford to live if you type in 2 bedrooms with 10K deposit and max monthly cost of £650 you can afford 57% of UK however it is apart from cornwall somerset and dover all north of a line from bristol to cambridge
I live an hour from glasgow 100K would get you 3 bed semi or terrace with garden and off road parking in nie village with decent school
where I work is a more deprived area but not that bad the same house would cost 65-75K

So here scrimping for a year or two for a couple both FT on or just above the minimum wage would make a house affordable, I know a couple both 26 shop assistant and fork lift driver just bought cute 2 bed terrace for 66K have 1 DC school is average but not bad

the problem down sizing is that older down sizers want a bungalow within walking distance or on bus route to the town or village centre, they don't want to be close to noisy bars but do want to be close to shops and the doctors. Mostly they don't want to move away from friends and their social circle perfectly understandably. However most town centre properties are flat or terraces bungalows use more land per house than flats but I can see why someone getting older doesn't want to move to a flat with 2 flights of stairs and no lift or to a retirement village where once you can't drive you are trapped

There are people on the thread saying how they have managed to save deposits in recent times maxwell and a few others who gave said they could have saved but didn't want to make sacrifices.
A social worker in my region could buy a property of their own - like the £80k one i linked to yesterday (and there are many cheaper). It isn't uncommon to get decent property at that price in northern towns. In other areas it would take 2 salaries or a ftb scheme where you buy a percentage. I don't think anybody should rush into a relationship just to buy property but I also don't think people should be put off buying because they can't afford the ideal postcode or have to buy under shared ownership.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23234033

The link mentioned by teacup.

I was born and raised in the Channel Islands and the housing market here is mad (though not as mad as it has been). Luckily, never had right to buy come in and unlike council housing it comes with a maximum income for tenants, so our States Housing stock is a) plentiful and b) doesn't get clung onto by people who've clawed their way up to a 100k salary.

There are those who get caught between being rich enough to buy and skint enough to get States Housing and the rental market is a pile of bastardry, the damp dodgy shit holes you can rent for a paltry £800-900 is...interesting.

Luckily, never had right to buy come in and unlike council housing it comes with a maximum income for tenants, so our States Housing stock is a) plentiful and b) doesn't get clung onto by people who've clawed their way up to a 100k salary.

Well done Channel Islands.

Here on the mainland the right-to-buy has created massive social injustice as well as contributing to the (general) boom in house prices.

Some of us 'Baby Boomers' were also in 'Maggie's Millions' . I left uni in the early 80s, when it was still only maybe 10% of the population with a university level education. There was no demand, no jobs. So I don't really buy into the Thatcherite idea that "You create your own destiny". I was consigned to the scrap heap before I even got started in life as were the vast majority of my friends. I barely knew anyone who wasn't unemployed for a year or more, after graduating. And although in the boom years of the late 80s, most of us made up for it - some people never could.

Tories

TinselTwins these ghost estates and starter homes in negative equity you are talking about, are they in Ireland, or in the U.K.?

I live on the south of england and new build flats are not selling, there's one luxury flat on my road that has been on the market for about five years now since it was redeveloped, I saw only this week that they've dropped the price by nearly 1/3 it's original price. It's still WAY out of your average earner's price range though. Developers/investors who buy up buildings to make luxury flats seem happier to sit on them empty at a high price, than to make them affordable so that they're filled, they do drop the prices but still wouldn't call them "affordable". There's probably some sort of swizzling going on there in some cases I don't know.

Friends who bought off plan too late (i.e. right before the crash) now have flats that they paid more for off plan than some of the finish flats in their building are selling for - they're trapped! They missed the boat, for a number of years before hand "starter flats" and off plan flats were great investments, but they caught the tail end of that and some who have needed to move (had children in a 1 bed, or got another job) have had to rent out their flats and rent themselves somewhere else to live, because to sell now, yes prices are still unreasonably high, but they bought at the very worst time so are still in negative equity

That is why it's terribly outdated advice to tell people to just buy a cheap small starter home on shared ownership or in an area they'll ultimately want to move FROM etc.

The "property LADDER" days are gone. Only buy if you're reasonably certain that the property will do you for a good number of years to come.

Tinkering about with finding savings of a few thousand a year isn't going to enable average earners to buy a home. 25 years ago, DF bought a decent 3 bedroom house for about £40k - about double his salary at the time. The same house now is over £300k. Unless I missed it, salaries have gone up a little bit not over 7 times.

Six - it costs a minimum of five or six grand a year to commute from Luton to London.

It's great up North. I went to uni in Liverpool and lived in Toxteth. It was perfectly adequate and town qas great.
BUT i am not going to uproot my dd from her excellent school and leave my support network just so i can afford to buy.

I wasn't suggesting people should commute princess did you miss the bit where I said that I wasn't suggesting people should commute that far? I was merely responding to a poster who said anywhere in the SE was mega expensive and unaffordable - even 90 mins outside of London. I presume people do live and work in Luton?

What if you can't find a new job in Luton? Finding a new job anywhere is hard, if not impossible.

Lots of kinds of jobs are very thin on the ground in commuter towns.

You're okay if you're a childminder/nursery nurse/dog sitter or plumber..
.. but it can be terribly hard for other small businesses when half the town only go there to sleep and do their shopping and socialising near work

There really are some bonkers views on this thread, do PPs really think that people should invest in a mortgage somewhere that they don't see themselves making a life?

I presume people do live and work in Luton?

Not really. Not in the same caliber of jobs as you get in London. Luton is a bit of a dive...

There are no decent universities. Why would e..g a big4 accountancy firm or a golden circle law firm set up a crappy office in Luton when London is only 90 mins away.

It is all more price sensitive back office operations.

I presume people do live and work in Luton

Everyone knows that all the jobs worth having are in London and the only work people can get in Not London is Minimum Wage Zero Hours and there is nothing interesting to do in Not London and everyone is a bit thick and racist and what not because if they weren't they would be in London in a big, high paying job which would still not pay enough to buy a house unless they received an inheritence or were otherwise gifted a huge deposit.

Why does an office in Luton or anywhere else that is Not London have to be crappy? Genuine question.

Anyway we have proper law and accountancy firms in Leeds (KPMG and the like) and were miles from London.

There are more jobs than minimum wage no prospects ones or big money law/finance. If someone is a doctor, dentist, vet, optician, retail manager, nurse or teacher for example (proper jobs that pay above minimu wage and require a degree) they could work all over the place in places where they can buy a house a lot easier than in a tiny overcrowded, overpriced corned of the country.

There's a decent point in there barbara, but Luton wasn't the best example to hang it on. Cities like Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham paradoxically benefit by not being commutable to London. What's true for those of us in large regional cities, with their own orbits and hinterlands, isn't for small cities and towns close enough to London to have been hollowed out by it.

There's a decent point in there barbara, but Luton wasn't the best example to hang it on. Cities like Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham paradoxically benefit by not being commutable to London. What's true for those of us in large regional cities, with their own orbits and hinterlands, isn't for small cities and towns close enough to London to have been hollowed out by it.

Ah but wait until hs2 is complete the end of time and watch as Birmingham then Manchester become just another London commuter town.
But clearly that's another argument for another day not cynical at all

Maybe, if HS2 ever happens of course. I think probably more of an issue for Birmingham, as you'd still have to piss about a bit more on the Manc one as far as I can tell.