To say ‘buy the worst house in the best area’ is not always the best advice.

[Totickleamockingbird]

I have seen rough areas of London move up so fast that we didn’t imagine it happening that quickly (Leyton/Walthamstow anyone?).
I am looking to hear from people who took a chance on a rough area and it paid off. I know what the standard advice is but just want to see the other side of the picture too.

@elmouno

I think there is a correlation between presumably naice area and having unbearably nosey neighbours who won't want you to do anything with your property. So... Nice isn't always so nice if you're trying to avoid those types of curtain twitchers. The best area is the one where you can get the most land and the least amount of people around you 😶

I agree with that. I think if the WFH situation persists, this is going to be probably the biggest change in our lives.

Meanwhile....outside big cities....

YABU.

Where I live, the worst house in the best area (which, FYI, I think I own!) is still worth it in terms of schooling, amenities etc.

Hey, who knew? There is live outside London!

Kentish Town first flat in 1997. Two beds £73.5K. Kentish Town had an interesting reputation then.

Just buy a home to live in for Christ's sake.

I agree for London. We bought zone 3 in 2011 in an area that everyone said to avoid.

We sold in 2018 for 78% more than we paid for it 🤯

I'm now mortgage free thanks to that leap of faith and dh determination to buy that particular house when I didn't want to.

I'm so glad someone mentioned Balham. I lived there is the early 90s and it was an absolute shit hole! I rented a terrible bedsit opposite Tesco for 50 quid a week! I then moved to Earlsfield where we rented a beautiful one bedroomed garden flat for 135 a week. The flat upstairs sold for 60k! I believe you wouldn't get change for half a million quid now. God I'm glad I left London in the end, much as I loved it!

My prediction for an area that won't gentrify though is Morden. What a dump (apols to anyone who lives there get out now ).

@Totickleamockingbird

Consensus seems to be that buying with the thought of moving later is probably the best middle ground and that living somewhere rough with the hope of it getting better with time is a recipe for grief.

You nailed it OP. Also if there's room to extend if the area was to improve and you're happy there ☺️

We live in the best house on a rough street but we chose it because we couldn't have afforded it if it were elsewhere. No regrets. We get a great house and garden for a fraction of the price.

I have always heard that advice, but never in relation to the idea that the neighbourhood would improve somehow so you'd get more money.

My understanding was that a less expensive house has value added to it by being in a nicer neighbourhood, but a high-end house in an undesirable area would have it's value pulled down. Though ultimately if you are getting the house you want cheaper, or more expensively, if the area stays the same you should be able to sell it for a similar kind of price, relatively speaking.

Lots of people OTOH take the view that you should choose the best location possible, in the sense of the kind of location that you like, and put less weight on the house itself, because you can't change the former but you can change the latter.

All advice of this kind os limited though, none is always applicable.

Hey don't diss Streatham. Our house has trebled in ten years. We wouldn't be able to afford it now. It's a wonderfully diverse area and appears to carry on being so, unlike Brixton which has become a Mecca for rich white thirty somethings. Tooting has some fabulous houses.

People overvalue being near a tube in my experience, when - especially in South London- you get around just fine on trains and buses and Uber.

My cousin bought in Balham, cleaned up nicely when he sold. But he sold because he didn’t want to live there anymore, said it was an odd mix of entitled rich And trendy folk (not his scene at all!) and getting mugged too often!
I live somewhere known to be rough, will never gentrify, house prices are waaaay cheaper than ten mins up the road and I bought a lovely 4 bed cos I wanted my kids to all have a bedroom and this was the only way to afford it. I love it here and I’ve never been mugged 😅 My kids love it too.

Still, if my house could quadruple in price in ten years that would be nice. But it seems unlikely 😂

We fucked this up - not in London, but in a very close satellite commuter town where house prices are very much dictated by (and dragged up by) people who work in London but can't/don't want to live right in it. We bought in a cheap area and although the price did go up when we sold seven years later, it did so by loads less than elsewhere in the town - if we'd bought a worse house somewhere nicer we'd have made a lot of money. More importantly, where we lived got sketchier and sketchier, the drug dealing and violence got more open (I think some crime was being pushed into us as other areas got nicer) and meanwhile we had a baby, which made me feel less like I wanted to live there - it was one thing when it was just us as a young couple, the fact that the headteacher of what would have been DS's primary school had to go to the press to get the police to crack down on the drug dealing next to the school felt a lot less ok to me and we've moved to a less nice house in a lovely, pretty area.

That said, I'm very glad we sold in March; we did make a profit and I think prices in that whole town, not just our particularly shit bit, are going to nosedive if the shift to WFH is permanent; it's an ok but dull town whose only big asset is that you can be in city in 30 minutes on the train. I think that's going to disrupt some of the patterns of gentrification in London, too, if it goes on long term as I think people will be less likely to want to live somewhere objectively a bit shit but on a tube line if distance to their office stops being such a concern and so some areas that were 'up and coming' will stop and stay.

My Dd and her partner live in a rented flat in Peckham. They love it there but can't afford to buy in the area. They have been out bid on flats in some neighbouring areas. They are now looking at buying in Walthamstow as they have friends who live there. They seems to thinks the area is nice and they can buy a house rather than a flat for their money. I do hope it isn't a shithole!

Gentrification outside London is limited. It is happening, but one of the issues is that in say Manchester, is that because the prices aren't rising as fast is that there isn't as much to be gained by taking the gamble to move to the 'up and coming' area in quite the same way. There simply isn't the money to be made. The money is being made in rental not ownership.

Absolutely, hence the reason you find investors buying up swathes of property in the north no capital appreciation but with yields of up to 47%. It’s not to be sniffed at. Now would I live there, probably not. But it’s a good solid terraced house in a rough neighbourhood in an area where there will be no regeneration.

London is a different ball game. What I’d do in London vs what I’d do out of London are entirely different.

You can't 100% predict these things of course but in London areas with good transport links and nice housing stock are likely to go up in value. You can often also see things like trendy food markets and hipster coffee shops and bakeries starting up as a good sign.

We did really well out of our first house purchase in an area of south east London that many of our friends would have dismissed as too grotty. But importantly we also really liked it as a place from the start, if it hadn't gentrified further, we would still have enjoyed living there.

Generally it's bad advice. Buy a home that suits your needs. The size, transport links, local schools, amenities nearby etc all matter - the middle ground is usually what works!

We are not buying in the most fashionable town, but we are buying in a good location with a new railway about to be built - it suits us location wise as we like to be near restaurants etc and we needed 2 parking spaces. It might not suit a family because the school isn't great I'm told

Still waiting for gentrification in South Norwood.

@Ubercornsfunkytop3

Interested by this thread but I’m in the North (Yorkshire) and just don’t feel this happens here....interested in being corrected of others think differently though. In my experiences places either remain shit or places that were once ok borderline nice get worse 😂.

I'd agree - this phenomenon doesn't really happen in Yorkshire. Some areas get more desirable (eg Bishy Road in York) but they tend to be places that were always seen as nice to start with.

Fascinating reading this. I lived in London 20 years ago and as a junior solicitor I was sent all over the place to courts and to take statements. Some of the places mentioned here always used to sink my stomach: Homerton was terrifying, most of East London was still full of open drug taking, shitty pound shops and teen gangs and even Balham was taking its sweet time up and coming. My friend had bought in Hackney and we would scurry back there in the evening as it was also pretty dangerous.
But I used to get the bus everywhere as I loved two much and loved all the buildings - I always remember those huge old houses around Brockley and Peckham and thinking they would be lovely.

Loved it “so much” not “two much”

Outside of London and a few big cities, it probably is true.

I’ve lived in my town for 20 years. The rough end of town is still the rough end of town.

The only thing that has had an effect On house prices is when a housing estate was built close to the ‘best’ high school knocking a few people out of catchment. And even that’s a relatively small uplift, definitely not doubling prices.

@CakeandCoffeeQueenake @Blibbyblobby and @hibbledibble

Funnily enough we've just moved back to the smoke after years away and chose v close to you as a good balance of price, centrality (relatively) and goodish housing stock. Loving it so far.

I think in London as one place becomes unaffordable people just go a stop or two further to an area they feel comfortable with. Nearly 40 years ago, I had to conclude I couldn't afford what I wanted in West Ken/Fulham and looked at Putney and could get such more. When I moved to Putney there was one restaurant at the bottom of the Hill, a bakers where you could get a cup of tea (V old fashioned) and a little market where they built a shopping centre.

I will say that the town I lived in as a whole definitely gentrified over the time I lived there - in terms of amenities, shops, etc (we got posh delis and a John Lewis!) - as more and more of the population was people who wanted to live in London but couldn't afford it. It was just our shitty area that got shittier!