To wonder how the next generation will buy a house

[macaronitoni]

Surely there needs to be a massive overhaul of the system. A new build home with two bedrooms on a new development nearby is £315k. Not London. Midlands. Who’s going to be buying that? Too small for a family with more than one DC but way out of budget for most first time buyers.

Without significant family help, how will today’s children and young people manage to buy a house? Something has to change!

@oiltrader, in the US local property tax is a % of property value, very roughly calculated at about 2.5-3.5% of land value charged annually. But it funds education and school budgets including the bus, police, and all the amenities including parks, libraries, museums and garbage collections. So naice high value suburban areas have great schools and lovely facilities, and trailer parks in former rust belt areas don't.

I do understand your starting point; the difference is that in the UK (which is unitary) everyone expects public services to be of a similar level standard across the whole country. And it can't be, because the taxpayers who pay 9x the basic level and only get vanilla service in return, don't feel they should be fleeced.

An example, anecdata. I have friends in California, living within 10 miles of San Francisco and working in a high tech business. Their property taxes are very high. But they can see the other end of the Golden Gate bridge in Oakland, also California and also close to SF, where property taxes and property prices are much, much lower. But Oakland schools are bad, services indifferent.

People buy where they want to live -- depending on their income and circumstances. Yes, we'd all prefer to live in Belmont but the house you want costs $5m and the same space in Oakland is only $2m, but the property (council) tax may be the deciding factor. There is a reason that car parts are far cheaper in Oakland than Belmont, because more people in Oakland do their own maintenance. Oakland's employers are warehouses, Belmont residents work for Microsoft.

The bit I forgot to point out @oiltrader is that in the US, no one even bothers to pretend that local services are equivalent in Oakland and Belmont. They are aren't, and are never going to be. Oakland is poor and Belmont is middle and upper income.

houses worth millions pay same council tax as those worth a lot less

need to rebalance.

it will mean we pay more but I am ok with that x

I'm 20 and DP, DD and I are living with my parents and my 28 year old brother. There really is no hope for us at the moment for buying property. My parents have just paid off their mortgage in their early fifties and have had to scrimp and save all their life just to do so, even in our area where houses are relatively cheap for their size. DP has still got 3 more years of university and even then we're worried that he won't find a decent paying job afterwards. Even my brother who has an established career cannot afford to move out. But it's all about what the future holds for the economy and govt and unfortunately this can't be predicted.

I think inheritance may be the main route for some for a time to come.

A two bedroom house is for childless couples

Haven't RTFT, but this attitude needs to change. The majority of new builds in my town are 4/5 bed detached boxes homes that sell well before they are built. The idea that a 2 bed cannot be a family home is ludicrous.

Not an inheritance then, spending their own money on their care 🙄

What kind of property are you looking at that you needed a £160k deposit?! That does not sound like a first time buyer house to me. We bought in zone 2 London in 2010 (so just after the financial crash in 2008, when banks had become very strict on mortgage lending) and only needed a 10% deposit. Yes, it reduces the number of mortgage products available, but there are plenty of 90% LTV mortgages out there Even if the £160k is a 20% deposit you surely could find somewhere within reasonable commuting distance of work for under £800K?!

My dd's only chance was through inheritance from her grandparents but the money is being swallowed up in care home fees so they'll be nothing left.

This is why it should be taxed way more. this will drive house prices down too. so we all win xx

A week in a dementia nursing home costs £2000. Most 'inheritances' won't last too long if they have to cover that, so I'm assuming future generations will receive relatively little from their grandparents

But what if you can’t afford the house. Do you just not but.

If people are buying as FTBs when they are older then they have to take on board they are not going to get what they want unless they have a massive inheritance or some other injection of cash.

You can’t miss out on the steps and expect to be handed your forever home.

As a baby boomer we are blamed for the cost of housing

But as a baby boomer if you decided that you were only going to buy in a certain area or weren’t going to start off in studio or 1 bed flat. Then complained that you couldn’t afford to buy. Quite frankly you would have got told to stop being a snob and get what you could afford.

We bought where and what we could afford.
As a ftb it might not have been the nicest area, or the biggest flat or one that didn’t need work and was certainly not your forever home but it was a place for the next couple of years. Then you moved on.
The only people I knew who bought as a ftb a flat with 2 bedrooms were people who had family help and even then they paid back their parents by renting out the 2nd bedroom to a lodger.

I think we need to look at why it is taking FTBs so long to get around to buying .

I rented before Section 21 and AST’s became a thing and the choice of rented places was very small and the choice of rented places you actually fancied living in was even smaller to non existent.

Faced with renting and living in a horrible little flat you bought PDQ

Don't forget that people in care still have a state and possibly a private pension to offset care costs. Also most people (but not all) are quite old when they develop dementia so may not live more than 2-3 years in a care home.

And of course not everyone ends up in care. My mum developed dementia and had to go into a care home (where she spent the last 2 years of her life and died aged 93). But my dad and PILs were all living at home when they died (aged 87, 87 and 90).

No two poster experiences are ever going to be the same. We recently lost DH's mum and I've been sorting out the estate. Because, and only because, we knew it was coming as she was 91, DH sold her house, sorted the stuff to be kept and divided it between the grandchildren. The house sale proceeds were banked and paid for her care home fees. What's left is going into ensuring DSIL, who is a NMW care worker, has a home of her own to live in as long as she lives. We shall get a bit, but will probably do BoMAD for our DC. We were self-employed for so long, we took pensions very very seriously from our mid-30s.

Another Boomer, who is out of touch with reality x

Au contraire. That view is pretty realistic.

In my personal experience, I needed a place to live in. Ideally reasonably close to my job. So that was exactly what I bought. In 1987. Near the top of the then property boom, and when I couldn't sell it to move on I let it for 15 years. Eventually, I sold it at a profit. Who would have done anything different?

It was what I could afford in 1987, on my single person salary. I barely ate outside my work cafeteria for two years with interest rates that hit 16%.

Interest rates were 10% in 1987.

@oiltrader My experience was the same as @Kennykenkencat @EffortlessDesmond . Calling us 'out of touch' won't change the facts.

I bought a scruffy flat in the mid 80s with no central heating and the original 1950s yellow plywood kitchen that someone had punched a hole in. It was all I could afford, but better than the ghastly bedsit I'd been surviving in for three years.

The priority was 'getting out of rented' because it got me away from exploitative London landlords.

By the time I sold, three years later, it was clean, warm, decorated and habitable. Unlike many, I managed to avoid negative equity, just. But it took every penny I earned. No holidays, no car, no nights out.

Standards of housing & expectations are much higher now. And that costs more. That isn't the fault of the boomers.

So what is the reality.

A group of people stamping their feet and crying woe is me I can’t afford to buy in the place I want to live or the house I deem I deserve to live in.
The world owes me a home like baby boomers have but I don’t want to do what they did to get it.
It isn’t right that I should have to work more than one job, it isn’t right that I can’t afford to buy my forever home as a ftb.
It’s everyone else’s fault I can’t get what I deserve.

It’s not that people can’t afford to buy. It’s that they can’t afford to buy the place they want in the area they want to live and they won’t hear of any other alternative or out of the box thinking.

I am in my 60s. By solely my year of birth I am a baby boomer and I have never been able to buy a house I really like in an area I want to live in.
It has always been about buying what I could afford and where I could afford it and trying to make the best of it.
I would have got my arse handed to me if I had turned my nose up at something that wasn’t exactly what I wanted and told to get real.

@Kennykenkencat you keep on digging. Your post reveals that you have absolutely no idea about the property market and even less about how fortunate you are to have been buying when you bought. You give boomers such a bad name. Your level of ignorance and self righteousness born of nothing other than when you were born is staggering

@Kennykenkencat now you've got me raging. Are you seriously so crassly ignorant that you have no idea that there is a cost of living crisis going on? That households
with two incomes are having to rely on food banks? That people can't afford fuel for their cars?
Yet you glibly swan about in your house that has multiplied in value through no effort of your own proclaiming how everything you have is down to your hard work and intelligence and anyone who can't afford a house is fecklessly buying gold plated avocados. People like you deserve a rude awakening .

exactly x

we are fortunate but most of our friends are struggling. Boomers dont really understand the new world and how times are way tougher for the youth of today

interesting commentary :

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/14/generation-britain-young-people-inequality

I am the cursed millenial and depending on location I agree with your hated boomer up there.
The few people around me who moaned about not being able to by were prole looking at postcodes where same house costed 3x-5x more than in one I bought in.

It's very location dependant. You can still buy 3 beds around 100k around mine. Yes, it will be a bit of doer upper, but it's a start. 2 beds even less and done up.
I know bunch of people (mainly immigrants) who bought in last 8 years on waitressing/warehouse/other nmw jobs wages. Couple even by themselves. That wouldn't happen in London.

The problem with "reality" is that it's different based on postcode much more than on generation in my experience.