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!

I think a large chuck of baby boomers money will be spent on care - I wouldn't count on an inheritence.

Something has to change!

Why?

People will keep voting for the system that locks their children out of home ownership, and nothing whatsoever will have to change.

I often wonder this. I think we'll see more mortgage companies offering mortgages at 7x salary as opposed to 3 or 5 and longer terms too. Maybe a return of interest only mortgages and definitely more 95% ltv too and definitely government intervention to prob the housing market up to a ridiculous level to aid growth.

We need new towns but noone wants it built near them. So much land tied up. Government has gone gone after developers who used to hold on to land and delay developing them but the biggest land owner is the RF, they don't need it but we don't have the presence of mine to address it as long as we're focused on small time or accidental landlords.

Or people will buy flats rather than houses, perhaps.

I think it’s only really been the last two or three generations that people have expected to own whole houses just for small families or childless couples or even single people.

At some point, unless we build all over our beautiful countryside, we will run out of space.

A growing population on a small island, and an expectation of home-ownership, encouraged by Conservative politicians starting with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980’s, who recognise that home-owners have a tendency to circle the wagons, has brought us here.

I think you’re asking the wrong question. The question shouldn’t be “how will the next generation afford a house?” It should be something like “how can we accommodate the entire population comfortably without destroying the natural beauty of the country?”

Honestly I don't know. I'm not a low earner. I have a deposit. Currently in my town ( fucking Norfolk) 300k buys me a 2 bed. For 1.4k a month mortgage for 30 yrs. I'll be 60 when I pay it off and that's an average 2 bed and a massive monthly mortgage.

We can afford it but what if one of us goes part time when we have DC. What if we become ill/disabled. what if interest rates rise. I won't get a significant inheritance, and I hope to god that this isn't for a long long time. People pretend it's the same as always but it's not. House prices to wage ratio is so much higher than for previous generations

You can get a 3 bed for £80k in the north east. Affordable on a modest single salary. People need to manage their expectations.

Rent controls would help.

There’s a MASSIVE recession coming. House prices will drop, hugely. Despite the government’s best endeavours to prop up the entirely crooked system of property ownership, a lot of people are about to loose a lot of money they never really had. The gloom of 2008 is still playing out and 2023/4 is going to make it look like a sunny day.

A lot of the market heating was driven by investment demand which is shrinking now that money is worth something again thanks to interest rate rises. So prices will come down.

But there will still be less owner occupancy. That's been falling for over 20 years. Hopefully policy changes will protect tenants more. There's already been some quite big steps in that direction. What they need to get a handle on now is actual rent amounts. You can't run a country effectively when a third of households are not only precariously housed but also have to give as much money as a landlord wishes to demand from them.

If we can sort that and make it more difficult to evict then renting is more stable and predictable and you don't need to own in order to have a secure home so it won't matter so much if people can't afford to buy.

@HeddaGarbled isn't only a tiny proportion of the UK built on at all? Something like 6%? We've got plenty of space as I understand it.

Plenty of houses too. Houses were being built at oversupply compared to number of households even before brexit took loads of households away. When we talk about 'supply and demand ' wrt the property market we aren't talking about actual people demanding houses are we? That's how I understand it anyway. It's about economic demand which is about investment and credit and what vehicles are available for both of those aspects. Housing has been a relatively useful wrapper for the past 20 years and especially the last 15 years of wage/currency etc suppression due to quantitative easing but that's not the case now so demand is shrinking. Isn't it?

Very few people these days will get an inheritance. What about people in council houses or whose parents rent who dont have a house to sell for an inheritance? Having an inheritance sound very upper classes. I doubt many people own houses realistically I dont know many people who do own houses or have savings to be able to give it to their kids. Do people really have rich parents?

I agree with this to some extent (although I think instead of the price, it's more useful to think of how many years salary a house now costs).

When I was growing up people would have a modest 3 bedroom (if they had 2 kids) house with one bathroom in the area they could afford to live in. Now everybody (people I know anyway) wants a state of the art with all mod cons, huge house, with an ensuite in the area they want to live in

I will buy when my mum eventually passes away, her house is worth approx £300k which goes to me & my brother. With that & my half of her savings I will buy an ex council house which today are going for £130k. When I die ds will inherit & can either live in it or sell to buy somewhere else. I'm not in the best of health so if I last 20 more years it will be a miracle, ds will be 39 then.

Ouch ! But true

I will be 63 when we pay the mortgage
No biggie
Then the house is ours

Working hard and saving lots. That's how I managed to buy my first house with my partner. I worked from 16 until present and saved for over 7 years. It's possible, lots of children nowadays aren't willing to wait

@ironingboredrefusal

Around 80% of baby boomers own their home. It's simply not true to say that very few people will get inheritance. Most will.

63 is actually not the that far away
Worked my way up the property ladder - so had a mortgage since 23

What if that's not an option ??

About 40% of the sale of each property will go to the government in inheritance tax and the rest will presumably be shared between siblings so the actual individual inheritance might not be enough to buy a house. It will help in other ways of course but I wouldn't just assume that many people will inherit a big enough sum.

@WallaceinAnderland

No, 40% of the sale of each property will not go to the government. That's not how inheritance tax works.

@WallaceinAnderland but even modest amounts at the right time in a person's life can snowball and make a significant difference.

Well that is not true at all. Nobody pays inheritance tax on less than £325k, which is still way more than the average house is worth. You only pay 40% on the portion over £325k.

Once the boomers are gone a lot of things will change. In fact, as soon as the most selfish and entitled generation the planet has ever see are removed from the seats of power, I think the world will change dramatically for the better.