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.

Do you think the sellers see that £75k as a profit?
With their moving and legal costs, mortgage repayments and decorating expenses, they've had a roof over their head, but the next house might be £100k higher than it was when they bought in Jan 2023.

Property at the dearer end of the market does not sell here in our area of the NW. We had ours valued between 595,000 and 675,000. We put it on at 570,000 but not a soul interested and we have recently spent a large amount on new heating system, insulation and roofing.

We cant drop too much lower because everyone is going with top end valuations meaning we will struggle to make an onward purchase. An example would be a nearby bungalow for £745,000! A nearby end terrace with no parking nor outside space is £425,000.

Even those of us who try to be reasonable are still failing. It seems it is still too much....

We bought our house for £1.2m in 2021 and I thought we overpaid. Houses in the street (superficially identical semis) are now selling for £1.4-£1.5m. We’re not planning to sell for a long time, but I can’t imagine we wouldn’t put in on for that if we did - you want to get the most you can for your home, surely? It’s different if things just aren’t selling at that level though.

The area we are moving into (for a better school) the sellers aren’t realistic. They are pricing 90’s builds which need work at the same price/more than brand new (so therefore much higher spec in terms of energy efficiency). As a result many just aren’t selling. Thankfully we’ve found a little gem that’s a fixer upper but our mortage is still going to be very painful.

I honestly don’t know how young people without substantial family help can do it now.

I'm seeing more and more homes being offered for sale via the 'modern method of auction' which pisses me off because whatever a property sold this way eventually sells for, there's an added buyer premium of a minimum of £6,000 to be paid. With the imminent increase in stamp duty, an extra six grand basically makes property sold in this way unaffordable for a lot more people.

My sister - late 40s, professional occupation, single and with a sizeable deposit, is really struggling to buy somewhere after renting for years. Out of 50 properties she's seen on Rightmove in her price bracket, at least a third of them are for sale via this method.

Also, I think there should be much tighter regulation around service charges - I've seen flats being advertised for as little as £60k, with an annual service charge over £3,000 p/a. Similarly, either newly built or fairly new flats with huge service charges - putting them out of reach for many single people or those on low incomes.

Having two incomes REALLY helps!

The ONS did their usual slight of hand and revised the figures up to 906,000 (+166k) in November 2024

Here is the BBC article on it.

Net migration hit record 906,000 last year
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3degx4029ko

Well, if the market will pay, vendors are only responding to, rather than creating a market, as such.

How did a bus driver and dinner lady afford a (what would become) £700,000 house?

Where I live, there are scores of bungalows for sale - all sitting around priced at between £40,000 and £80,000 more than they eventually sell for. As a self-confessed property addict, I check the land registry details for the eventual sale price and I'm never surprised at how much LESS vendors have had to settle for.

There are also houses, built on the sites of former bungalows by developers, still for sale two years from being finished. A few of them in the £1m+ bracket have had in excess of £200,000 knocked off their asking price. One, a former church, has been reduced by over £350,000 and it's still not sold.

To me, that says the covid bubble, where so many people were rushing to buy coastal and countryside properties, has very much burst.

We had our house valued at £410k and I thought it was personally over priced but it sold 1 week after it went on the market. We bought it for £300k 6 years ago 😬 admittedly it’s had £20k worth of work done but not a huge amount for that price increase

Houses are worth what people are willing to pay. Times have changed and while it's not easy to get on the property ladder it's really about managing expectations. Of course I wanted to buy a lovely house as my first home but as a single parent an inner city flat was what I could afford. Its taken 10 years of paying a small mortgage for me to save and have decent equity to move to a nicer area.

People are funny arent they. The house will sell what it sells for. What it has to do with your children is a mystrey!

No complete stranger will sell for a price your children cannot afford. Actually the way things are going - maybe they need to become train drivers. Their shocking salaries surly cannot continue to rise (but they do!)

I started with a 1 bed flat with an ex partner many many years ago. As PP said - you wont get a 3 bed semi in a nice area if you are on minimum wages.

It will just go on until it ends up like Switzerland with average first time buyer age of 50+ in the cities.

Of course it's unlike Switzerland in that it's not because everyone is earning loads and is rich, it's because we're letting Russians and Indians buy all our property.

A house is worth what someone else is willing to buy.
If it doesn't sell, they will no doubt reduce the price.
Most people will try to get the best rice possible, unless they need to sell quickly.
It is possible they may have done some internal works that dont actually show, though.

OP doesn't state how long the bus driver and dinner lady lived there or what their financial circumstances were. Maybe they bought it in 1982 for £75K with some help from Mum and Dad? Remember, back then the average house price was 2.5 - 3.5 x the average salary, now the average house price is 9.5 - 10.5 x the average salary. Boomers may have experienced interest rates, at their peak, of 15%, but this figure was on house prices which were significantly lower than they are now.

How can you say the WHOLE of the SE is over crowded? I live in a small village with the South Downs national park on my doorstep...not crowded at all.

Inflation has been <> 22% since Feb 2021, so in real terms your value has only increased by 3%... i.e. not much.

Yup - finally been priced out of my hometown. Even almost tripling my own house in 15 years, I need a bigger home for my growing children and a 4/5 bed NORMAL house in popular South East city are getting to 1.2m for a doer upper and 1.3/1.4m for something average at best. You need 1.5m for "nice". 2 schools have had to close as there are falling birthrates as noone but London relocaters can live here.

Also the dinner lady/bus driver query is interesting. My DF and DM brought a house in a snazzy part of West London for £8k in the early 1960's. He then stayed put for over 50 years. House was far too large for him in the end and was massively cluttered so in the end he couldnt face moving somewhere smaller. He only left when he was too frail to move anywhere other than a care home. My DF had a white collar job but never went over the basic rate tax band.

How is it cheeky @headlic ?

If people don’t want to pay that price, they won’t.

It allways amazes me, someone buys a Taylor Swift concert ticket (which is a want) and sells it a few months later for an extra £100 than they bought it for and everyone loses they're minds, yet someone buys a house (which is a need) and then sells it for an extra £100k a few months later than what they bought it for after doing nothing to it and no one has a problem with that, it's just supply and demand for both items.

Global demand for asset investment including property shows no sign of slowing. If anything, numbers of middle class including upper middle class, are rising as more economies become developed.

Your problem OP is that you're living through late stage capitalism, regardless of the cheek or not of homeowners.

Indeed.

Also, most houses are (at least) second hand.

So if you were to put your house on the market, would you be selling it at the same price as you purchased it?