To be irritated by the Londoner exodus to my town?

[thesecondnamegame]

I've been priced out of my Greater Manchester town by the London diaspora. Anybody who knows the area will know which town I mean. My tatty council town centre terrace is worth 300k. A load of Londoners came up after the BBC moved to Manchester. Half the kids in my kid's school's parents are from London and they love to make sure you know that. House prices have become ridiculous and are in a different world to the rest of Greater Manchester. It's ridiculous as it used to be a very unremarkable market town (albiet with not much to it) and now it's gone all 'naice' and I'm having to move 10 miles away because it's reaching the surrounding towns and I simply cannot afford to live here and I want to buy a property. It annoys me, I keep imagining somebody who had a London salary and bought a house in London, sold it, and came up here and bought a house 3 times bigger for the same price as their smaller London home. It just seems like they cheated. There are no school places either, because a lot of the Londoner's chose this particular town for the schools. The catchments are bloody tiny, I know somebody who lives in a village about 4 miles away. The schools in this town are the closest schools. No school would take her child and she ended up having to home educate for months.

All my relatives who bought properties or private rented have had to leave, even those who went to uni and got great jobs.

I'm not on about the Londoner's who couldn't afford to buy a left to get on the property ladder. I'm on about those who already owned in London.

Nope. This is not any better OP for your argument.

You have no idea how they have afforded probably what is a one bed flat in London vs a 3 bed house with a garden in Manchester.

Extortionate childcare prices, extortionate taxes, extortionate living costs means any wage increase gets eaten up by those, including the fact fewer people work part time or SAHM, to afford this in London.

Maybe you could acknowledge the taxes paid by those working in London being used in Manchester (which would equally be as dickish a move as your original post was, in its assumptions because of course, this should be distributed but not at the expense of those like you, despising people wanting to move in to your area to live and spend their money)

Instead of blaming 'Londoners', look at Rishi Sunak (he's from Hampshire btw).

His ill thought out stamp duty holiday not only cost the taxpayer millions, it's also a major contributor to the increased house prices.

Government schemes like the taxpayer funded Help to Buy. Taxpayer money given to developers to construct shoddily built but expensive new builds. Inflates the bubble.

Now now - we all know that us Londoners just bowl around taking all the good houses and bragging about where we’ve come from, i mean the poor OP has to even contend with her poor children mixing with (god forbid) Londoners.

So, so, so many holes in this logic.
What I can't get over is that you are moving to somewhere cheaper ... And therefore doing exactly the same thing.

Inequity is a major, major problem but it's daft to look down on others because of where they have lived previously. Especially when you're doing exactly the same thing.

Hope you didn't vote Tory !

I could drive 15 minutes up the motorway and buy a house exactly like my 300k valued one for 80k.

A very, very specific bubble has been created for my town and the surrounding area and these bubbles are popping up elsewhere gradually.

Yes you're right OP, you are a hypocrite.

But there are so many areas this happens to where locals can’t afford to buy property (I live in Cornwall) but I don’t think it’s fair to blame Londoners when London’s property prices make it practically impossible for locals to buy there and that is because of the same situation you are describing.

What is a bit worrying, is that I know more than one person who's used their help-to-buy ISA on a house in a cheaper area they don't really want to live in, because they're worried that the area they want to buy in will be over the allowed £450,000 before they can buy there.

That isn't how it's supposed to work.

I don't think altrincham, I've not noticed the place overrun with Londoners. I do think you're being unreasonable op, the whole of greater Manchester seems to be crazy prices at the moment.

People don't decide to move 'en masse', companies decide to move their offices, hardly the workers fault

@FiddlefigOnTheRoof

Tell your local people with local interests at heart to sell their properties to locals earning local salaries and for local prices. Right?

Good point. Presumably OP will refuse any offers from London-based buyers want to move north or otherwise that would make her massive hypocrite.

Blame foreign investors for buying overpriced, 'lock and leave' properties. Blame buy to let landlords decimating the housing market. Blame Thatcher for bringing in Right To Buy and successive governments for not building anywhere near enough new housing to replace lost social housing stock. Blame second home owners moving to poorer communities and pushing up prices.

Don't blame people trying to get by and do the best for their families, just because it doesn't suit you, personally.

@thesecondnamegame

I could drive 15 minutes up the motorway and buy a house exactly like my 300k valued one for 80k.

A very, very specific bubble has been created for my town and the surrounding area and these bubbles are popping up elsewhere gradually.

Go on then. What are you complaining about?

Jeremy Corbyn, for example.
He's from Dorset. He moved to London (pricing out a Londoner). If he moved out, he wouldn't be a Londoner moving out. He's a man from Dorset.

Talking from experience, I have met smug Londoner's who like to go on about how lovely and big their house is and how they are so glad they left London because they got it all nice and cheap

I met a lot of people like this in my town too. When you're unable to buy solely because of the influx of people offering well over asking prices because they're amazed at how much they can get for their money, it's aggravating. Basically they are possibly trying to cheer themselves up but definitely ignorant and tone deaf to the area they're now in.

We’re 45 mins on a high speed train from London.
6 of the most recent lovely 3 bed houses (340k - 360k) up for sale in our town have been purchased in cash by people selling their 1 bed flats for 400K. These same houses would have been 320K tops in January.
Our Estate Agent neighbour has a list of cash buyers for every property that comes up.

Londoners have had to put up with you lot for years.

Unless the 1990s series ‘Cold Feet’ was a lie, I’m not really buying the idea that until recently people in Manchester have had no professional skills.

I perfectly accept I'm a hypocrite because I'll be moving to a cheaper area so I can buy. Though I'm only going 10 miles not selling a house that's gained crazy area based equity beforehand.

'crazy area based equity' is not the house-owner's fault. If you need to move for work, and your house has gained equity, what are you meant to do? Accept a stupidly low price and give the difference to the poor northerners?
And I'm interested in the 'only going 10 miles' thing. Is there a rule or a limit on how far Londoners should be aloowd to move?

YABU...HTH

I live in central London and the exact same Is happening here. Can’t afford to buy, generations old families having to move further out, empty investment properties, transient student population etc.

Do you really not see that of course it is a benefit to live somewhere the the cost of living is low so that you can afford to live on a low wage. Do you think that there is no one in London on NMW? Do you think that cleaners and nurses and teachers and retail workers in London are all on massive salaries?

I'm not talking about people doing jobs within the local communities such as nurses, teachers or cleaners as you say and I wasn't even talking about people specifically from London, I was talking about people doing well-paid jobs in large cities who can now work from home online and have sold their houses in wealthy areas, to then buy homes that are cheap for them up in the Highlands but out-pricing people living and working locally (like those teachers, nurses and cleaners that you mention), earning far lower wages, whilst those moving in buying the homes are still on big city wages. The cleaners, teachers are nurses can then no longer afford to live there as they're priced out.

The problem is gentrification and middle classes generally being the ones who move to find particular careers and pick the cream of jobs.

This means that working class families across the country have faced the negative impact of that.

Its not increased opportunities for many in this bracket (though it may have for those in the northern lower middle class for whom moving to London was more difficult).

There has always been a particular tension between northern working class and northern middle class - its not helped by media stereotypes which depick all northerners as working class (I remember hearing from a friend who knew the family about the dramatisation of the Warrington Bombing for the BBC and how they had 'working classed' the family of Tim Parry as part of that and how it didn't reflect reality at all. There is a media erasure of the Northern Middle Class generally in these narratives).

In my experience the majority of those who I know who have moved 'up north from London' after benefitting from a greater inflation of prices and more equity - have been northern middle classes who have returned up north (perhaps to different areas) for a better standard of living after moving around with their careers. They tend to be older and have / about to have kids - so younger people generally can't compete with that.

Its intensely frustrating - particularly if moving to London for your career was never a viable / realistic option in the first place.

But its not a north v south thing. Its more a class clash and the general trend of gentrification. Its affecting communities that haven't previously felt this (to a certain extent London being the capital has always had a degree of this) and have particularly strong (and vocal) community identities.

I find a lot of Londoners are awfully like when you see a lot of Americans on holiday.

They dont need to 'make sure you know that' they are from London/America, the obnoxiousness that exudes announces it loudly for them.

@thesecondnamegame

The investment in spreading out the country's wealth has been screwed up anyway because it's way too concentrated on certain areas. If you aren't in Manchester (well, south Manchester) or Liverpool, get fucked basically. And nobody cares about Birmingham which is always forgotten about because it's all about "The North!".

I could eat a tin of alphabet soup and shit a more coherent post than that.