To thing some homeowners are taking the mick

[headlic]

A house on our road was sold for £600k in Dec 2021 & has been put on the market for £735k. The house is exactly the same inside and out aside from a lick of paint and new furniture. Are housing in the south east increasing as such a rate? I thought house prices were going to stagnate for a few years.

I am really disappointed. Our children are looking to buy a house and increases like this make it seem completely impossible. I thought they would be able to get something decent, I didn't account for a 20% increase for house prices.

The previous owners of the house were a dinner lady and a bus driver. The current owners are a dentist and an accountant in their early 30s. Lovely couple but just an example that home ownership is going to be impossible for so many people.

Or good jobs, most peiple don’t inherit till they are 40s 50s or 60s.

I've just read an article that everyone should buy in Japan. They have heaps of empty houses so you have to do them up but they cost ( roughly) between 30000 pounds and 110thousand pounds, They need work doing to them as they've been empty for years. And any foreigner can buy one. One couple bought a 12 bed ski lodge for about 50000 pounds, spent about 100 on it and are set up. Full up with tourists every winter as Japan is great for skiing. WTF Am II doing with my life?

YANBU. It’s a mess. Housing is at the centre of all of the social issues we face IMO. Shelter is a basic human right but this is what happens when it’s treated like a commodity.

We viewed a house that was on the market for £550k and our top budget was £500k. We wouldn't have even considered viewing it but the EA said to us "I am not showing you something you can't afford", which we took to translate to "It's overpriced and even though I've tried to tell the owners that, they insisted it went on the market for £50k higher because they're greedy bastards".

Before we went to see it I showed it to my own EA who said "no way that's worth that - £500k tops".

So, we went to see it and offered near the asking price. Vendor said no and refused to take anything under the list price.

That was 13 years ago and the house hasn't changed hands since!

I don't think one of the owners really wanted to sell but it was a divorce situation and he deliberately listed it over the odds so it wouldn't sell.

The EA effectively said to us afterwards that they were going to stop showing it because it was a waste of their time.

So, despite the reputation, something it isn't the EA overpricing!

Lots of parents pass down their inheritance to their dc (from gps).

Some people's perception of 'exactly the same house' for sale for x amount more can also be very wide of the mark. Last time I sold a house, my next door neighbour told me she expected to sell for the same price as me. My house had an additional attic room, brand new kitchen and 2 new bathrooms. Her house had a 20 year old kitchen and one bathroom - but as she had had these renovated many years ago, she felt they were exactly the same and said 'it's the same house'. We often have no idea about the condition of other people's houses and folks aren't always realistic about standards of decor etc.

Trying to sell something for the most you can possibly get, how is that taking the mick?

Good for them if they find a buyer.
If they don't, then they'll have to lower the price.

I have never looked for a job without trying to get the highest salary I could possibly get, why wouldn't I?

DS moved out of the south east to Wales so he could buy a home. He's very happy there.
I moved out of the south east to Somerset so I could also buy a nicer home and have not regretted my choice at all. The south east is over crowded, overrated and too expensive.

I think 'certain ' locations and towns/small city's will be like this because large amounts of people who can go to these levels are all flocking to the same few places.

Some are deluded and yes, they can cause bit of mayhem.
Example
In my area houses went generally for 120k, one seller decided they will market theirs for 150k. Not some updated extended one, actually worse than some for 120k.
Suddenly most houses changed to 135-145k.
Month later most went back to circa 120k because banks wouldn't value it for more (bless) this one for 150k sat there for nearly a year, then went off market! It still didn't sell based on sold data. I saw it briefly advertised as rental later.

I imagine they are trying to recoupe some of the stamp duty for their new purchase given the changes. It was always going to happen.

Anyway your general rant at homeowners is misguided. A house is worth what someone is willing to pay, due to demand some areas see huge increase in short amounts of time.

And I am not defending the homeowners. I am not a homeowner and given it is just me and my income I am unlikely to ever be one.

But people will ask for what the market will pay. What needs to happen is government pressure to reverse the supply / demand balance we have currently (we need more homes / apartments to be built.)

thought they would be able to get something decent, I didn't account for a 20% increase for house prices

You sound either hopelessly ill informed or deliberately so Op

Do you seriously think the housing market is the fault of homeowners?
Really do not give your DC advice please !

Do you own a house near this house, with the 38% increase? If so, the way gentrification works is eventually you will see such a large profit that you will be inclined to sell your house for a similar rise, when you do you will cut each of your children a chunk of cash for them to invest (thus the privilege of homeownership is bestowed often, rather than earned), but often this would mean that you’ll all go and live somewhere cheaper (or you could downsize from a 4 bed house to a flat). It’s been this way for decades, so no new news this end.

I agree. Also EA photos can be deceptive about condition. I remember last time we were buying, we looked at several houses that looked comparable from the photos but were much different in reality.

Yep similar down our way (SE). Once normal 3-4 bed detached but v close to neighbours, or semis, on normal road, now they’ve all been extended and maxed out and are going for £900k-1m. It’s not for me! But it’s for someone, as they are selling like hotcakes.

Also ones that haven’t changed since they were bought a couple of years ago are going for a hundred grand more or so, just cos of demand.

Perhaps they did more work that you think? A house is worth what someone will pay. Or maybe it's overpriced and won't sell. Either way, it was never an "affordable" home was it? Probably hasn't been for decades.

When adjusted for inflation, the value has increase by less than 4%, so has performed worse that most houses in the SE.

Whilst our population continues to grow at around 1-1.5% per year, I would expect prices to continue to rise, significantly above the rate of inflation for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps if we were able to build 1M new homes a year, we might see an impact on prices in 3-5 years, but in reality it's unlikely to ever get much beyond 500K.

The problem is that it has to be paid for.

So who is going to build the houses? (Which are extremely expensive and time consuming to build with about a million hoops to jump through) Certainly not the government.

Add to that increasing immigration and population growth and we are in a mess. Where will these homes that are a "basic right" going to come from? Will you take some asylum seekers into your home?

Has it sold though?

We made an offer just before first COVID lockdown (early March 2020) on a property £635k, which was accepted. The vendors had bought it less than 2 years earlier for £585k (they had made some improvements in that time).

They ended up pulling out just before exchange in July 2020.

June 2021, they re-listed it for £850k. They called us to see if we’d be interested at this new price 😂 £200k more than our offer they accepted the year before. We laughed. Someone else did try to buy it as was sold STC for awhile.

March 2023, went back up for sale (same vendors, sale must have fallen through) for £935k!! It’s now nearly 2 years later and it’s still up for that.

5 years since they accepted our offer of £635k, it’s listed for £935k, no improvements made. They haven’t even taken new photos. And still not sold after 5 years including when rural properties exactly like that were going under offer for cash the day they went on the market during COVID. I often think of their poor, poor estate agent who has had to endure whatever madness they are experiencing. 😂

Moral of the story: you can list it for whatever price you want, doesn’t mean anyone is going to buy it.

It's not that big an increase. There has been cumulative 20% inflation since 2021. So relative to other prices it hasn't changed.

If you have wealthy parents. There is no investment coming from mine who simply are not wealthy enough.

If prices for houses including rentals keep going up and put strip what people can actually afford then the market will stagnate and even collapse.

It's only going to get worse as population growth massively exceeds housebuilding. Immigration is a huge factor in this.

Here are the 2023 numbers as the full (revised) 2024 numbers aren't out yet.

Number of new houses: 133,213
Number of new people: 906,000

YABU. If people don't want to pay that much, they won't. Then they'll have to drop the price. They will probably have had the house valued and been given some guidance about how to price it.