Sick of Manchester rental costs

[Cinammonroll]

I know it's one of the biggest cities and there are many jobs here, but it's just not affordable to rent.
I take home about £1750 net per month, I'm looking for a better paid job.
If we're supposed to be spending roughly a third of our pay on accommodation.. the most I could afford would be a houseshare, or a small bedsit with everything in one room.
If you want a flat that's more affordable, you're looking at approx 10 miles away from the city centre. Even flats in inner city undesirable areas are expensive.
I live with my partner luckily and split costs. However our rent has just increased by £175 pcm. Yes we'll get a small payrise in April, but it doesn't match the costs.
I've just been on rightmove and looked at rent in places like Blackpool. I know it's a more deprived area, but rent is astronomically cheaper than Manchester.
I'm contemplating leaving the city, obviously depemds on my partner too but it's just not affordable at all.
We went to view a crappy 1 bed flat for 575 without any utilities or council tax, and were told we were one of 12 visits that afternoon.
Has anybody else found this and decided to move to a cheaper area?

I lived in the roughy bit of Macclesfield 10 years ago, a small one bed flat above a shop for £400 a month and was earning £12,000pa as a placement student. Taking into account inflation, £525 doesn’t seem like a bad deal at all!

I see your point OP. Many of us pay mortgages for 3 bed houses that are not a great deal more than that. Moving further away is an option as is house sharing. But how long is this sustainable? The city is expensive, the country is expensive. Where is affordable? The mismatch between jobs and housing affordability is too big. Meanwhile the jobs which benefit society the most are the lowest paid. Do we really expect HCA’s who work at city centre hospitals to work an hour away? Commuting to London used to be tolerated in exchange for the salary but this is a whole new ball game

At that price they'll very likely be house shares. A lot of people list them without ticking the box for house shares so they still show up.

In a lot of commuter towns around London, its not much cheaper than z4-z6. You have your fair share of people spending £1 million on an ordinary looking house because its near a train station. tbh these people could afford London too but maybe not in their preferred neighbourhood and with small/no garden. These are just personal preferences though,- the reality is that the base cost for an average home is high whether you are in the m25 or outside.

Personally I'd spend the extra money they want for rent, on a commute and live further out. There's some lovely affordable places with good train links in Cheshire. Some of the villages around Crewe are lovely!

The issue is the timing of his commute which is very late at night after public transport has stopped running in several areas .

If the difficulty is your partner getting home from work then would it not be better to live in the city centre? ok, it's more expensive than a flat above a shop in Wigan but there's furnished, modern 1 bed flats near Victoria Station for £850-900 a month which should be affordable on a combined income. (I assume the £1750 is just your salary from the way you've written it?)
www.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/details/63735634/?search_identifier=1811c384caa158dd6e4241276329de5b

575 is cheap compared to what most renters pay, but I get what your saying OP, its madness that a tiny badly maintained flat should cost that.

@HotDogJumpingFrogHaveACookie maybe but there's loads with full pictures of empty flats. I did a few searches putting in eg 5 miles of Gorton or 5 miles from Ardwick.
Yes loads house shares but also lots listed as just flats / terraces

You are deffo not being unreasonable. MCR has gone proper mad of late.

I live in what was an unfashionable suburb of South MCR when I moved here 12 years ago. Good transport links and a cycle ride from town but the kind of place people turned their noses up to (or lied and said they lived in a neighbouring area!) I bought my house directly from the elderly landlord I initially rented from and really fretted about it at the time (wasn’t really ready to buy and had TV induced fantasies about property searching with Kirsty and what’s his face).

Well, It turned out to be a financially lucky move, and my area has gentrified considerably.
Sadly, this means that my DD is constantly losing school friends who are moving way out of the area due to rising rent costs or not being able to afford another bedroom when another baby comes along.
She’s lost 4 really good friends in the past few years, one to Warrington, one to Glossop, two families to Devon (parents work remotely and realise; they can have semi detached houses by the southern sea for the price of their south Manchester terraces).

I was happy in my unfashionable suburb because it was a local-place-for-local-people sort of area. A real community based around the schools/park etc. Now I’m wondering about Southport or one of the seaside places on the Wirral to try and get that sort of feeling back.

I am in the north and I meant commuting from places like Darlington on the east coast mainline in exchange for a london salary. Some university friends did this. Completely see your point though as London and surrounds has become more “gentrified” it doesn’t seem like there is a cheap option anymore. When I was young I had a family friend living in the east end. This was the early 80’s. On the job he did, it wouldn’t be possible now

Standard for working in London.

@op you're not paying anywhere near half of your income on rent.

Maybe with all bills, yes, but your take him is way more than your rent.

But YOU, Op are paying less than one third of your income on rent and that is just your income and excluding your partner’s 😂

Empathy is alive and well, I see.

I know 😂

This one is slightly more than that crummy one bedroom but it looks well maintained and closer than Rochdale, if that's any use to you? It does look to have those crappy storage heaters that cost £££ to run though
www.openrent.co.uk/property-to-rent/manchester/1-bed-flat-woodfield-road-m8/1601823

Would getting an ebike or doing the CBT and getting a moped be an option for your partner if you can get something a reasonable distance from the centre? It would open up your options if you don't need to be on a late night public transport route

In terns of "resigning yourself to it", we don't have a choice?

It was Tony Blair who wanted London to turn out like this, I voted for him with no idea that he'd wanted London to be like Monte Carlo.

I often say on here, I wouldn't want to be young again because it was so hard. But I don't know how it can be addressed, especially as it's probably global. Any politician would do the same.

The idea that all places become like London is horrifying. But I remember watching the protests against globalisation and thinking globalisation was going to be horrifying too. And it turned out to be even worse than we thought. Those protests might not even go in history books.

I am completely sympathetic. I just think we mustn't lose sight of history. Many posters here will be too young to realise that rent as a 1/3 of salary has not been realistic for decades.

London is actually much more affordable than a lot of other cities in other countries.. I am from another country and my dad told me my London flat (that we bought for 392k in 2019) is 'cheap'. We have government built flats in my home country that can be sold to citizens for as low as the equivalent of £150k (salaries are on the level of London); so I think my dad's point is that it is 'cheap' for a flat bought on the private market (in my home country, private housing is for the top 15% of society), that can be sold to anyone in the world etc. What my dad doesn't get is that there is no alternative; that people on benefits can have higher housing costs than me.

The problem is leaving housing to the private market. Every developed country seems to have an issue with affordable housing and this spreads to the rest of the country as the priced out move to suburban and rural areas. New housing is generally luxury as builders want to maximize profits.