' 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?

I don’t understand how anyone gets on the ladder in London. When I lived with my ex and his parents in Hayes their very run of the mill semi 3 bed was worth £450k . In the North east where I live now we have a 3 bed detached, loads of garden for £170k. The London allowance on my wage would have been 4.5k. Not sure how that helps bridge the gap!

But you don’t buy a run of the mill semi you buy a 1 bed flat.

friends & I all own in London due to good jobs but more importantly parental help (ranging from 20-300k plus).

That would be a more relistic price for a chicken that's led a happy life andgiven the farmer a decemt profit

The figures still don’t really stack up with NameChangeOhNameChange1

150k house
30k deposit (20%)
Leaves a mortgage of 120k

£80 a week (after tax) is £4160
Plus ft job at £17k pa
Total pa 21,160

120,000 mortgage on wage of £21,160 - is 5.7 times the salary

Which bank would lend a single 22 year old 5.7 times their salary in 2013? The affordability rating on the ft wage (especially as dominos salary may not be guaranteed), is unlikely

So there’s some exaggeration somewhere 😉

@snoutandab0ut absolutely spot on. @Oliversmumsarmy where do you put your stuff / child in a one bed flat?

It really is as simple as building more affordable rental homes. My house costs £1500 in rent. If I moved any further away from work and family I would be completely isolated. But £1500 in rent = no ability to save to buy.

If renting wasn't so unreasonably expensive and BTL landlords didn't expect to make tens of thousands of pounds per year profit things would be very different. There should be a cap on the profit made from BTL. One flat I lived in, the mortgage was £650 PCM and I was paying £1550 to live there. Even with a commission to estate agents, that landlord was making around £10k profit per year. The landlord also had 2 other flats. And a full time job. On one hand, how wonderful for him; to have such a great nest egg for his family. On the other hand, if that rent was capped at a certain percentage, I could have saved £4-500 per month and been a step closer to buying by now.

Not demonising BTL Landlords there; just pointing out the differences.

Also - every one in now who has bought a house who is my age has done it with significant help from their parents. Every single one.

Part of the problem with the lending issues (deposits, affordability and what banks will lend you), is that when you start taking longer, and you get older, you’ll be further along in life stages and will want more room. A single could happily cope in a studio flat. Would you want to live as a couple with a kid or two in a studio flat in your mid 30s?

I dont understand why so much of the conversation has to centre on " how can we provide more affordable housing in the SE" rather than " how can we ensure that wealth and job opportunities are more equitably spread throughout the country."

Eggs used to be relatively very expensive apparently.

Eggs still are relatively expensive. I have to budget them in carefully...

@looktothewesternsky my mortgage company stipulate that i must charge rent thats is a minmum of 140% of my mortgage payment.

@LifeofClimb i got lent 6x my salary in 2012 as a single 22year old earning 16k

My chickens cost me £15 each, it’s a lot more than they cost in the supermarket, but they will lay about 600 eggs before I eat them
I might be missing the point but I think after brexit house prices will crash and interest rates will rise.

Lazypuppy which bank? That’s really unusual! Most banks cap out at 4.5.

My mortgage advisor in 2015 offered me a max of x4, 30 years old with no dependents and a 10% deposit. (Which priced me out of my area at that time)

My dps house cost £30k in Cheshire in 1980, it is now worth around £400k, I put 30k 1980 through the inflation calculator a year or so ago and the house would be worth about £135k if it had risen at inflation

Yes house prices have risen ridiculously in some parts of the country and not in others. But blame Thatcher for house price increases.

@LifeofClimb Halifax. And we did it through Leeds Building society for our house, 5x our combined salary with a 5% depsoit.

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....

It was me that mentioned this but not as a "suggestion". It was simply to explain how me and people in my friendship group, had afforded to buy somewhere without any parental help.

.

The problem with the rich people with empty house argument is that the houses aren't actually empty. FIL owns lots of houses. They all have somebody in them 24/7 who takes care of and cleans the place. Dh still owns his childhood home but hasn't set foot in it for 10-15 years. It's still in such immaculate condition we could move in tomorrow because there is a grounds keeper living there. It's not that simple. Those houses are still peoples homes and workplaces even if they are not the owners home.

The last time house prices crashed was the early 90s. My children were little then. We were lucky not to be affected but I met lots of other families at the time who were stuck in 1-bed flats and even studios with babies and toddlers because of negative equity. Typically, they'd done something like this:

Buy tiny flat for £50k (London) as first-time buyers, 100% endowment mortgage so no capital paid off at all before they had the first child
One or two children arrive, household income drops, no real chance to save
Desperate to move to somewhere bigger or nearer family - get flat valued - valuation is £40k, so they would have to find £10k from some other source to pay off the mortgage
The place they want to move to is priced at £60k, they have no deposit, nobody in the family can help them, no lender will lend them £70k (new home + deficit on existing mortgage)
Result: they stay put.

This all resolved itself in the end, of course, because house prices went up again. But it was a grim few years for those who were trapped and I fear it might come again after Brexit.

knitted it would be simple if there was a cap on the amount of houses people could own.

@Lazypuppy and therein lies the problem.

@NameChanger22 that doesn't really add up. She earns £30K annually, so £20K ish after tax. £20K x 6 years = £120K.

£120K - £100K 'saving' = £20K

So she only spent £20K over 6 years? £3000 a year? Well she doesn't live in London then because that's just the amount of my yearly travel card. She obviously had outside help for food, housing etc otherwise no way could she have saved £100K in 6 years on that salary in London, even living frugally.

The last time house prices crashed was the early 90s.

There was also a pretty significant crash in 2007.
One which large portions of the country still haven’t recovered from.