' A chicken would cost £50'

[stopitandtidyupp]

Leisurely watching ' The big questions'
discussing is London only for the rich?

One woman said if house prices were a chicken then a chicken would now cost £50. Now she meant in London but I wonder about the rest of the country.

I live in the NE and I am struggling to get on the ladder.

I guess my AIBU to be annoyed at house prices and is there an answer?

in our village which is nice ex council houses with 3 beds and garden are about 80K

What are the jobs like in the area, and a rough postcode please. I would love to find somewhere with that much space for so little.

I’ve made more money on my property in 20 years than I’ve earned in 20 years

In the past it was a lot easier to get on the ladder, it was also a lot easy to get a buy to let mortgage, an interest only mortgage & a 95% mortgage. It was also a lot easier to make loads of money from property by doing nothing.

The housing market in many areas is screwed & I don’t see how it’s sustainable. The younger generations have to face higher uni costs, higher rents, lower wages, start saving for a pension in their 20s & the possibility of no state pension, a no longer free NHS & tax increases. Oh to be young!

@NameChanger22 "find a way to move" is just such a naive and arrogant thing to say. If you have children / elderly parents / relatives you care for them how can you just find a way to move? Again, you mentioned it's about preferences but sometimes it is about facts.

'Saving hard' is a relative concept.
Arrived in London '97 and on agency work paid off student loan £7k from my home country within 18months, while also sending home additional £200-300 p.m and renting privately. I was earning c£18k p.a.
Life was hard, but not impossible.

Roll on 5yrs and my DH & I had to borrow money from my in laws (paid back with interest since), to afford our first deposit for a place which was ex-local authority in a really undesirable area. If we'd saved harder we definitely could've bought better/more easily, but we'd lived comfortably on our combined £50k+ salaries. And we must take responsibility for that.

@OftenHangry thanks that's really kind of you to say. I hope it works out too, I'm back with my parents (at the age of 38!) saving hard with my husband to make the difference up to be able to buy a better home together.

I know I'm lucky in many ways for the parental support but it's so much harder to buy 10/ 12 years on. Not to mention moving back in with parents 😂

Since 1908 prices have on average increased 80 fold, wages have increased 350 fold
as many people have said the price of housing is much greater but the price of most other things proportionally is much cheaper,
for example petrol was 4.7p per litre in 1908 the current price of 126p per litre is only 25 times that ( not the general 80x) so petrol despite the moaning is actually much more affordable than 100 years ago

in 1908 you needed to work 49 minutes to buy a litre of petrol, 19 minutes to buy a pint of beer and 11 minutes to buy a pint of milk,
today the numbers are 12, 7 and 2.5 minutes

thanks that's really kind of you to say. I hope it works out too, I'm back with my parents (at the age of 38!) saving hard with my husband to make the difference up to be able to buy a better home together.

I know I'm lucky in many ways for the parental support but it's so much harder to buy 10/ 12 years on. Not to mention moving back in with parents

This is exactly me. 38 too. Without parental support it would take me a few years longer to save.

In my area an ex council house will go for £400,000 plus. How the hell are young people supposed to afford that and it's not even a nice area.

This will cost you £75,000 in (grotty end) Southampton. The frontage looks nice... it was once a 3 bedroom family house. It's now divided into nine 'studio apartments'.

Leasehold (70 years).

It really does depend on where you are. Almost all of my friends (ranging in age from early 20s to late 30s) are homeowners. The couple who are currently renting are house-hunting at the moment. The one thing they all have in common is that they saved hard - cheap holidays (if they had them at all), public transport and walking instead of owning a car and second jobs in the evenings and weekends). But it's perfectly possible to get a nice 3-bed semi with driveway and reasonable garden for £150K round here, with a 30-40 minute commute to the nearest big city.

There are still large parts of the north where property prices are lower than they were in 2006. I made a loss on the property I sold as it never recovered its value to what I paid for it. The couple who bought it were FTB in their early 20s - she is a teaching assistant and he worked at the local supermarket. They'd been living with parents to save for a deposit and working FT from age 18. They used help to buy and I think their cash deposit was £7k or so.

I used to live down south, but moved because I knew there was absolutely no way I could ever afford to live a reasonable life there and afford my own home.

I don't know what the answer is. In the late 1990s I was able to buy a nice Victorian one bed flat in a very nice area of London for £90,000 with a deposit of £10,000. I was a year or so into a professional starter job with a salary of approx £25,000. I recently looked at what that job paid now and it isn't much more at all. The flat last sold for £540,000.

My DH had an almost identical experience in another part of London at the same time. A few years later we sold both and bought a 3 bed terrace together, when we had a second child we bought a 4 bed house which we extended by remortgaging and is now a 5 bed. Each time it felt like a stretch to us but it would be absolutely impossible for anyone to do the same now without significant capital input from elsewhere.

I'm very aware of how unfair this is and that we were very lucky to hit that moment in time together, although another friend bought a flat at the same time and has never co-owned but through pretty standard career progressions and moving areas now lives in a lovely 3 bed house in a nice London suburb. Again this would be unthinkable for a single person starting out now.

Would happily take big hits on house prices if it could all become affordable again. Although we have very little savings, I never take for granted the security which comes with having a home we love and have almost paid for. I try and prepare our children for the fact that they will have to work very hard and are still unlikely to ever live in close to their home turf as adults.

Fucking hell Miljah that's appalling! I couldn't make out the square meterage of it but it must be under 50 m/sq. Does it even have a shower? The wet room appears to be a loo and basin only

£70K up here (NW) will get you a 1 or 2 bed back to back terrace with a very small front yard. Compact but still enough space for a couple to start a family and live comfortably.

Prices are coming down in my neck of the woods, not unusual to see reductions of 100-200k across a few months so who knows what will happen after Brexit.

Would happily take big hits on house prices if it could all become affordable again.

This is all well and good in places like London but it would crush the north east where in a lot of places the prices haven’t recovered from the first crash. Like I said up thread my house is only now just at the same price it was sold for in 2007 and many of my friends are still in negative equity.

www.dailymail.co.uk/property/article-3553988/Homeowners-trapped-negative-equity-house-prices-stuck-2007-levels.html

I know it’s from the daily mail but the findings still stand that in Newcastle there is still a 12% drop in the average house price since 2007. 28% in Middlesbrough.

People are always so south focused on these threads.

For people who don’t trust the dm here is a guardian link with an info graphic showing housing price recovery since the 2007 crash.

www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jul/14/northern-england-house-prices-negative-equity-moodys-bank-of-england

I don’t know what the answer is

Building of affordable social housing for renting. So people have somewhere to live, that’s affordable

Building of affordable social housing for renting. So people have somewhere to live, that’s affordable

Here here

I bought my first house in the 90s with zero deposit aged 20. But in those days sellers offered cash back ie the value of the required deposit. Using the same advisor as your seller meant you could use that cash back as your deposit. You never hear of this now...... I wonder why? It was a god send......

Also, there are so many empty houses around the UK, the government needs to do something about that. Instead of building new houses, I wish the empty houses could be brought back to use as housing stock.

Also, there are so many empty houses around the UK, the government needs to do something about that. Instead of building new houses, I wish the empty houses could be brought back to use as housing stock.

There are even more empty new build flats, unsold or sitting as investment. Yet more are built all the time.

It’s not ‘entitled’ to want to live near your support network and have access to a secure home fgs! Neither is it something to be proud of that you have to live on porridge and walk 5 miles to work every day in order to afford a house. It’s a fucking disgrace that our housing market has come to this, mainly thanks to Thatcher turning it into a profit-making exercise rather than a basic human need.

Also, if everyone living in inflated areas in London and the SE moved en masse to cheaper areas, it would only serve to drive prices up in those areas as demand outstripped supply. And it’s all very well telling someone in a deprived area with no jobs to ‘just move’, but if they can’t get a job in the first place, how are they meant to have money to move somewhere else?

I earn £37k in London, and have almost £20k in savings and I’ve got more chance of burning my arse on a snowball than getting on the property ladder on the open market (it would be doable through a scheme such as shared ownership or help to buy but the monthly repayments would be crippling, so swings and roundabouts). The industry I work in is London centric and while there are jobs in SOME other areas of the country, they pay significantly less. I’d be looking at AT LEAST a £10k pay cut, which again would affect my ability to afford a house in those areas. If I moved somewhere even cheaper there would be no jobs whatsoever in my industry, and yes, of course I could get a job in something completely different, but I’d probably be looking at a significant pay cut there too, or costs of retraining for a different career (bye, savings). The way the market responds to supply and demand means that even if people distributed themselves more evenly throughout the country, house prices would rise as a result, therefore pricing out people who’d grown up in the area. And then we get back to ‘just move somewhere cheaper!’ but those cheaper areas are shrinking fast because everyone’s moving into them. It won’t be long before having a home is only the preserve of the rich if things carry on as they are

People having to move away from support networks will surely cost society more in terms of things like increased need for social care and mental health services for the most vulnerable.

@stopitandtidyupp that's the mess isn't it? When you have to move home just to afford the next step up.

I get all the forget your holiday, cancel your phone walk to work move somewhere cheaper. But think about it - it's only a home, why does half the population have to scrimp and save and miss the best years of the lives just to have a home - a basic human need. It's so wrong... for as long as people focus on suggesting people aren't saving hard enough they loose sight of how many years of your life it costs you to sit at home eating porridge

Who ever suggested that people should walking instead of owning a car and do second jobs in the evenings and weekends needs a reality check - my husband is a response police officer - please explain how he's supposed to get home at 3/4am after an afternoon shift or get in at 6am if he doesn't have a car. And just try fitting a second job in around a five week rotating shift pattern when your body is messed up from constantly changing shifts. It's just not plausible....

As I see it at the end of the day he's doing a decent job (that's dangerous most the time) and that should afford you a home.

lso, there are so many empty houses around the UK, the government needs to do something about that. Instead of building new houses, I wish the empty houses could be brought back to use as housing stock

I was watching a programme on this.

The landlord of a large HMO, all done ready to house 12 homeless people couldn’t get the housing benefit part of the UC paid directly to him. The council were saying that he could but then capitulated and realised he couldn’t. The mp said he could but then went on to say the form he had to fill in wasn’t available yet.

The whole thing was a shambles.

We have gone down the route of demonising all btl landlords untill we have the situation where those that want to do things properly are stopped because of non joined up systems and the only alternative left for the person is the streets or some dangerous space owned by a slum landlord.

Things have gone seriously wrong