This thread was started in a general sense because we have noticed that the inflated house prices which used to be confined to the SE and a few other pockets of the UK are creeping further towards the SW. I wondered whether they were starting to creep North too.
I chose £450k as a general figure because that's the price of a small 4 bed new build near us. It's not the value of our house.
Yes, there are lots of places North of our current location that have houses for less than £450k. Trouble is that any purchaser would have to know what an area is like, I mean really like, to know whether it would be somewhere that they would choose to live.
Lots of people have suggested Swindon. I'm sure that plenty of people are happy living there, and all power to them. We wouldn't.
I was brought up on a farm. We live rurally now and want to move somewhere as, if not more, rural.
Of course I know that you don't necessarily need to speak Welsh to get a job in Wales, but you do in my profession. Otherwise we'd move there faster than you can say Cymru.
As I said upthread, despite having family in Scotland DH won't move there I don't understand why and it frustrates me.
We don't need to be near good schools and don't mind living near social housing at all. The one proviso is that I usually work with socially disadvantaged groups and I don't want to run into clients in the local Co-Op.
Our original intention was to stay in this area. Lately though, as we've seen the value of our house increase, so have the prices of the next step up. We're beginning to think that we'd be better off taking the equity and running.
There are a few places in other parts of the country that one or both of us know well, being mardy with me because I don't have an intimate knowledge of Staffordshire for example, is just daft. I doubt that anyone on this thread has an thorough idea of what it's like living everywhere in the UK.
Rightmove can tell me the price of a house but not what it's really like living there.