If you moved in lockdown/ covid times are you still living there?

[youshouldnthavetoask]

Where I am (SW) there seems to be a lot of houses going up for sale and also sticking around on the market. I know this is partially due to interest raises, financial uncertainty but I wonder if part of it is about WFH not being the godsend I thought it would be, or people realising that living rurally in lockdown is lovely but now back to reality it's a pain in the ass when it comes to broadband speed/ taxis/ public transport/ good deliveroo options/ getting to an airport/ schools etc.

We relocated during lockdown, from the SE to East Anglia, no regrets whatsoever, been a great move for our family. Big influx into EA from London etc, my lovely solicitor wondered if they may be an exodus once the WFH economic climate changed, possibly so, there is a lot of property on the market now. Personally, we wouldn’t ever consider moving back.

We moved may 5th 2020 and have no intention of moving

We moved right at the very start of first lockdown (mid end of April 2020) and still live here, but less happy with it now.

We did the opposite and moved to London when everyone else was moving out. Got a great deal and felt smug when all the shops and shows and businesses reopened!

@Niceweatherseeker excellent!

@Divorcedalongtime can I ask why? Here in the SW I feel it's possibly the winters, the crowdedness in summer and the drug problem which is making people reconsider. As if some thought London was the only place with drugs!

Yeah we are.

I'm guessing your move wasn't due to covid/lockdown. Planned before all that happened? What area did you move to and what are you less happy with now?

Yep. No plans to move back anytime soon. But still within 50 mins of our respective offices, and 30 mins on train to our old hangouts. So not such a dramatic move

Was a spur of the moment move because there were suddenly no competition or less at least.
the parking is much more of an issue than the small issue it was then and it’s just less of a idyllic place.

They pictured the good life: fresh air, country walks and community spirit. But a year after a record number of people rushed to escape cities — and the pandemic — to live out their green and pleasant fantasies, the reality is kicking in: an hour’s drive to buy a cup of coffee; four-hour commutes; dark winters and cold, lonely nights. For some former city slickers, the buyer’s remorse is so acute that they are already selling and moving back to tarmacked civilisation. They just don’t want to tell anyone about the biggest, most expensive mistake of their lives.

Take Daniel and Emma, who declined to give their surname. In June 2020, feeling frazzled after lockdown with young twins in a three-bedroom terrace in south London, they sold their home in Stockwell for £800,000; craving space and fresh air, they bought a four-bedroom house in a remote village in Dorset for £780,000.
“We couldn’t think of anything lovelier than living against a backdrop of hills,” says Emma, 39, a marketing consultant. “We had fond memories of holidays in Dorset and wanted to embrace a more rural lifestyle.”

Yet, almost 18 months on, country life isn’t what Emma and Daniel, 41, who runs his own business, imagined at all.

This is from a times article on the topic.

Moved out with long term partner in first lockdown and still here. Best time to move as we got a bloody good price on the house

“We feel isolated. Most of our friends are still in London, and we’re tired of long car journeys if we want to venture outside the village — even getting to the supermarket is a trek,” Emma says. “We have come to realise we don’t want to live a holiday life full-time.”
The couple have put their house on the market for £880,000 and are planning to move back to the capital for the twins to start school in September — they are looking in Barnes, southwest London.
Daniel and Emma are not alone in having second thoughts. One Yorkshire estate agent says: “We had a chap who paid several million pounds and took 32 days from start to finish to complete the transaction. He’s stayed just six months. The first viewing for the resale of the house is planned to take place before Father Christmas arrives.” In another extreme case, the removals company Anthony Ward Thomas reportedly moved one family from Barnes to Bath last year, only to move them back eight days later.
In 2020 Londoners bought 73,950 homes outside the capital, a four-year high, according to Hamptons; in the first six months of 2021 a further 61,830 bought homes elsewhere, the largest half-year figure since the estate agency started compiling records in 2006.

I moved out of London to the south west in summer 2020. We moved to a very rural spot but we were only renting so did it knowing it wouldn’t permanent and it was an opportunity to try something very different. We lived there for two years until our landlord sold up and we’ve since bought a house in a less isolated location (in a bigger village, on a bus route to a smaller city) which feels like the best of both for us. No regrets though and no plans to move back to London. We were getting to the age where friends were thinking about moving further out anyway and I have a countryside hobby that isn’t really possible in London so it never felt like a forever place for us. Neither of us grew up in cities so we weren’t clueless about the realities of rural living. There’s plenty I miss about London but there’s pros and cons to everywhere