To think there is a serious problem with the housing market in this country

[Kitchendisco21]

I was just about to buy my first home having spent 10 years saving a deposit. Thanks to the stupid help to buy intervention, the houses I was able to buy are now 50k more expensive so I am completely priced out. I am so utterly sick of it.

And no, I can’t move elsewhere/ get somewhere smaller/eat fewer avocados! I have been saving for a decade.

Aibu to be so fed up. I read last week that 98% of keyworkers couldn’t buy a home in the uk now. When will people actually wake up & see what a major problem there is? I am so angry.

@ thebillyotea how many properties do you own, out of interest? You sound like the typical small time investor who thinks they have worked it all out.

@Ginuwine
This a thread on the horrendous property market and it makes me bitter about feudals hoarding land 1% own about of U.K. land, the royal family is in the top five: the wealth that we know of).
Now call me envious when I say this is a monstrous system and things need to change.
Over 100,000 people have died in the last year, a lot of them alone and miserable.

Get out of this slave-like mindset FFS.

@AutomaticMoon... Agreed.

In the old days, you used to rent a property while you built up capital to put down as a deposit on a property you buy

In the old days people used to leave school at 16 and go to work. They would stay living at home till they had met someone, saved enough to buy a home and only then get married and start their married life in a tiny flat or house. Then work up from there.

In the old days there was a shortage of rental properties as landlords couldn’t remove you once you had started paying rent and with rent control there was no money for the landlord to repair anything if it went wrong,

In the old days when I first started renting it wasn't hard to find a non slum landlord that accepted housing benefit. I worked but had periods of sickness and had to do time on disability and housing benefits. This was in London. There was also much more access to social housing if you were disabled and more help from social services with that. I knew people who were housed after suffering physical and mental health problems. Now it's different. I ended up with a very controlling and violent partner and I've been really struggling to leave. It's too hard to access safe long term housing. There's very limited housing for disabled and long term ill people, limited social housing priority, and very limited options for safe legal private rented. If I was lucky enough to have a secure rent controlled private tenancy, I'd happily pay for my own repairs. It's a safe home for life.

[quote AutomaticMoon]@JaninaDuszejko It’s not BS, I can’t bloody move to Scotland or wherever just because homes are cheaper there! My partner’s family lives here, this is why we moved here, I have no family at all.[/quote]
It's not necessary to live close to your family, London and the SE is full of ambitious and hard working people who have moved away from their families for work. I grew up in rural Scotland, both my brother and I live in different parts of England, both of us were ambitious and moved to where the interesting work is (shockingly that is not always in the SE bubble). My PIL come from different continents, they met in a third and lived in three different continents during their marriage. DH and his siblings have all lived in different countries and continents as adults for work reasons. My workplace has people from all over the world who have moved here for the job.

You have made the decision to live in a very expensive part of the world to be close to your partner's family and that has had consequences on your ability to buy a house. That is a choice you have chosen to make. If it is important to you to own your own house you can choose to either move elsewhere so you afford to buy or you can stay where you are but buy elsewhere and rent it out. But don't complain about the consequences of a choice you have made. I suspect though the reality is that you are choosing to not buy the kind of property you could afford and are complaining that you can't buy a 3 bed house. Because in Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham it's possible to buy terraced houses for ~£100K and there's even a couple of studio flats in London for that price.

We're overpopulated, nuclear family has faded and Thatcher sold off the council housing stock and they've stopped building more.

It's the same in every small, in terms of land mass, country that has a large population.

It's a royal family or it would be state owned if you were republic. Let's not be naive and think that everything would belong to people ...

@Bythemillpond

In the old days, you used to rent a property while you built up capital to put down as a deposit on a property you buy

In the old days people used to leave school at 16 and go to work. They would stay living at home till they had met someone, saved enough to buy a home and only then get married and start their married life in a tiny flat or house. Then work up from there.

In the old days there was a shortage of rental properties as landlords couldn’t remove you once you had started paying rent and with rent control there was no money for the landlord to repair anything if it went wrong,

@Bythemillpond, That was my generation. Single people mainly stayed in the family home, incomes were pooled, and a couple wouldn't get a sniff of a council house without a marriage certificate. We had a council flat in Scotland, gave it up to move to the North of England. We had to privately rent as being on the 'waiting list' took years, so incomers had little chance. The house we rented was pretty run down, outside lav, but so were plenty of others back then. My mother was not impressed when she came for a visit.

Property was cheaper, relatively, but mortgages were hard to get in the 70s, we had to buy a new build. It was the most basic, cheapest, in an area we didn't like. Eventually we scraped enough for a similar property where we wanted to live. No help from family, no RTB, although I had a manager on a big salary who did just that!

We're retired, own our home outright, but we had to move to a smaller one to pay off the mortgage. Small pensions, (£40 a week less than younger state pensioners) few savings, not all Baby Boomers have goldplated retirements. Ill health, self employment, low paid work, redundancy can all negatively impact on pensions.

Younger generations seem more financially savvy, and much more aware of the need for qualifications, settling into careers before starting families. But there are also far more single person and single parent households, more owners of holiday homes, and BTL is a fairly recent concept. The lack of social housing is also an issue for lower income households. I'd like to see some not for profit landlords build mid range housing on a rent to buy basis. A manageable moderate rent, part of which goes towards a deposit to buy after a set period where the occupier has proven ability to pay. That could help those stuck in expensive private lets who could afford a mortgage, but can't save a deposit. And England needs to withdraw the RTB, as Scotland and Wales have done.

@janinaduszejko

If you could show me a link to one of these studio flats in London for 100k, I'd thoroughly appreciate it.

I am a teacher. My work is essential and highly in demand in my area of outer London. I am going to need to move away in order to buy a house, despite having over 50k to put down as a deposit. The maximum I can borrow on my teacher's salary is 140k. The cheapest properties on the market are over 230k. So I will have to move, which is shit for me, but also shit for the students I teach. The schools near here hugely struggle to recruit because living here is far too expensive.

So, if you didn't just make it up, I'd love to see a link to a 100k house in London.

[quote Solidaritea]@janinaduszejko

If you could show me a link to one of these studio flats in London for 100k, I'd thoroughly appreciate it.

I am a teacher. My work is essential and highly in demand in my area of outer London. I am going to need to move away in order to buy a house, despite having over 50k to put down as a deposit. The maximum I can borrow on my teacher's salary is 140k. The cheapest properties on the market are over 230k. So I will have to move, which is shit for me, but also shit for the students I teach. The schools near here hugely struggle to recruit because living here is far too expensive.

So, if you didn't just make it up, I'd love to see a link to a 100k house in London.[/quote]
But your budget isn’t 100k, it’s 190k and there are properties available at that price point. Yes if you want to buy a house you will have to move away, but that is a choice for you to make.

@thebillyotea

despite many of us finding it morally repugnant.

there's always someone who is offended or against everything you do. If you really believe anyone would care about them...

I’m not interested in other people’s opinion. I find it morally repugnant so I wouldn’t do it. I’ve got a decent occupational pension instead.

Solidaritea

It all depends on where you have to get to in London.
We have always found that moving out a few miles can make the journey into work quicker than coming from another London postcode.

If you could show me a link to one of these studio flats in London for 100k, I'd thoroughly appreciate it.

Studio flat in London. No idea of the niceness of area. Of course, as a teacher you can work anywhere and with a budget of £190K you can afford a house in most parts of the country since the average house price is £250K so most FTB properties are much less than that

Solidaritea
Your budget is £190,000

This is a 1 bedder for £170,000

www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/100087481#/

Or a 2 bedder

www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/68687544#/

This one has an 80 year lease though so not sure if that is a problem with the mortgage company

Ultimately it all depends on where you need to get to for work.

It's shocking, I'm paying extortionate rent for a poky 2 bed flat with no garden when a mortgage would be half the price yet I can't get one. I had my hopes raised two years ago when our local housing association decided to built an 'affordable' shared ownership block of flats opposite me when I enquired about the price these too were totally out of my price range. As a working single mum I'm incredibly frustrated by the lack of affordable housing to buy.

@JaninaDuszejko
What do born and bred Londoners who are ill or disabled do? Ambition doesn't stop you getting too ill too work. I was ambitious and hard working. Ill and disabled people can't just move away even if they wanted to rely on underfunded adult social care instead of existing support networks. They need a 'local connection' to be housed out of London or the south east. They didn't choose to get ill or be from London. The ambitious people you know who moved away from rural Scotland have the option of going home and being rehoused under local connection if they get ill. What do vulnerable people from London and the south east do?

Who teaches the children in London and the south east if teachers can't afford to live there and move away?

JaninaDuszejko

The problem with studio flats is because they are under 30sq metres you can’t get a mortgage

lollipoprainbow a few of the people I know moved into tiny apartments even 1 bedroom places with children taking the bedroom and mum and dad on a bed settee in order to save for a deposit and cut everything down.
They moved to cheaper areas that had the train station in the town that got them back in to London.
I have never lived in an area that I have lived in or even bought a house I like. Every flat or house has been governed by price and what we can afford.

A home is shelter, a basic need. Prices need capping - very unpopular, i know but the situation in some areas is ludicrous. We've seen how overcrowded housing has enabled this virus to spread. We really do need a massive overhaul for this situation.

Yes, it's a shocking situation and something needs to be done but, sadly, successive governments have done the very opposite and imposed policies which have caused prices to rocket further (latest being Rishi's stamp duty holiday and new 95% mortgage scheme). That suits them (many of them own property portfolios) and their wealthy friends/ party donors.

There is a huge shortage of social housing since Thatcher introduced right to buy and did not use the money to build more council housing.
Now we have a huge general lack of housing, benefits being used to enrich landlords because the cost of rent is far unaffordable relative to incomes, and the situation where renters are unable to save enough for a deposit on a house, families squashed into tiny flats while retired people without dependents are frequently living in large houses. The situation is untenable. I worry what will happen in a few decades when the state has to pick up the tab for care for a large percentage who were never able to purchase a property.
I could be wrong but the house purchasing on steroids situation at present feels like a bubble.

@JaninaDuszejko

If you could show me a link to one of these studio flats in London for 100k, I'd thoroughly appreciate it.

Studio flat in London. No idea of the niceness of area. Of course, as a teacher you can work anywhere and with a budget of £190K you can afford a house in most parts of the country since the average house price is £250K so most FTB properties are much less than that

That's exactly the point I was making. My area of outer London desperately needs more teachers. But we're all moving away because it's either a tiny studio apartment here or an actual home elsewhere. The difference in pay is negligible (less than 10% more for outer London compared to most of the country).

It's so unfair on the local children - temporary and poorer quality teachers because that's what's available, due to others being priced out. I don't know the solution, but the system seems broken.

Back to BTL. The way I see it it's like this: everyone needs somewhere to live. Some people who already have somewhere to live pay more for property than the people who don't have somewhere of their own to live can afford. Then they let the people who don't own property live in it, but only f they agree to pay so much money that they can't afford to buy there own property. How is that fair or ethical?

This is why only the richest countries (and Cuba) have access to covid vaccines. It's hoarding.

Its like giant pharma too. Sure you can have life saving medicine if you or your country pays a huge amount for it.

It's extortion.

What about people who want/need to rent, like students and for work? Where will they live? Also as I said upthread the rent is less than the mortgage would be so its enabling people to live in areas they’d never be able to afford and making the area more diverse. If those houses were sold the people currently living in them wouldn’t be able to buy them.

I’ve rented many properties by choice. Without private landlords I wouldn’t have been able to move to an area and work for a year contract. I see being a private LL as providing a service.

We used to have a thing called student accomodation. Short term lodgings or rentals too, for people staying somewhere temporarily for work. Longer term and for older people, families, and the disabled who need to settle and put down roots, a more secure and affordable option is needed. So that's secure rent controlled tenancies (private or social housing) and no more government meddling aimed at propping up the house price bubble through stamp duty holidays and low/negative interest rates.