AIBU to ask why so many £1m houses....

[Locationvshousevsgarden]

..have very old bathrooms and /or kitchens and need updating ? We are house hunting and I am genuinely perplexed by the amount of houses in this bracket that still need money spent on it ! I would have thought that a lot of houses in this bracket would be immaculate and only require new flooring or one bathroom or painting throughout but no.... out of the over 15 we looked at over 10 of them require significant work and updating. It just baffled me and I suppose I thought at this level and price most places will be in excellent condition or move ready.

Location will be the main factor for sure.

Usual advice is worst house on the best road

Odd question OP. You might as well ask why all £1m houses don't have four bedrooms or a separate utility room? Surely it depends entirely on the area and what the comparables are. One million pounds isn't going to get you a lot in or near London and with new bathrooms and kitchens those houses might well be priced closer to £1.5m.

No point doing up bathrooms and kitchens to sell; most buyers want to put in their own choices there.

Also, there's people like me who find it obscene to rip out perfectly functional rooms every few years for the sake of passing fads/fashion. The amount of consumption of resources/waste into landfill for this stuff is appalling and it's a pretty recent phenomenon to think it's an automatic must-do.

Like many of the previous posts, we have lived in our house for years and we extended and renovated completely when we moved in. It's now not quite worth £1M, but anyone like you looking to buy it would want to renew everything. I think the issue in your opening sentence is "need". If people are comfortably living in those houses clearly they don't need a new kitchen it's just it has a layout or aesthetic you don't like and quite possibly looks a bit tatty. Replacing ours with a similar quality kitchen would take most of our net income for one year, so that seems both ridiculous and as @Normallyinthepool is discussing, very wasteful environmentally. OP, would be interesting for you to work out how much a new kitchen and bathroom and decorating throughout cost, and then see how often you can do that on your own income? Remember the kitchen and bathroom invariably come with electric and plumbing works, plus new flooring, so adding a lot to the cost. Then decide if you would or should be prioritising that against pension payments, cars and holidays, or building up savings in case of redundancy.

There's been very little work published on the environmental impact of changing interiors and the most well publicised seem to focus on quite short term impacts, e.g. I'm sure we've all seen the news reports comparing the environmental impact of fake and real christmas trees. Vinterior regularly cites data saying 22 million pieces of furniture end up in landfill in the UK every year and the average lifespan of flatpack furniture is just 3 years.

However, I did find this study of the environmental impact of updating commercial interiors that showed the environmental impact of regular 10 yearly updates is greater than the impact of building the building in the first place.

We just got a valuation for MIL’s house of £4.8M.
As far as she is concerned it is in ‘move straight in’ order. As in, the 90’s style kitchen and tired bathrooms work just fine. She would never consider renovating them. Obviously, whoever buys it will gut the place before they set foot in it.
That’s an issue between the generations. Many in MIL’s generation expected things to last, not to be trendy and I respect that quite a lot.

I’m with the OP here. It is one of my pet peeves. It’s not just about decor, it’s the lack of financial planning and lack of realisation that others pay the price. For example, the family next door whose property value is undermined because the property looks half derelict. It’s the children of said owners who have to stump up for new windows or pay the plumber because, instead of setting aside the tax free lump sum pension, the owners have spent it all. It’s the taxpayer when old electrics start a fire, thus putting lives at risk.

@Getamoveon2024 and @Normallyinthepool here we go, a lovely long pdf link for you to read looking at the environmental impact of regular kitchen updates. Suffice to say it does indeed have a massive negative impact on CO2 emissions.

<a class="break-all" href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1596359/FULLTEXT01.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiqvoW42KaVAxUkWkEAHatdAIwQFnoECFAQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3U_x4GgzLowTwXQtD7BrvB" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linky link

Well- our house is in theory a million pound house. So we are asset rich and cash poor. We can't afford to do our kitchen up. Tradespeople come in, see the house and the quotes go mental. We were quoted (for example) £250 k to change our little lean-to into a glass lean-to.

What people forget, and what governments seem to forget, is that if you have a house in The South the 'value' might be big, but you may not have an income that meets it. DH's job was lost in December. Mine was lost in April. Even when we had jobs our total household income was under £60k. But he bought his house in 1987. Yet, we are apparently the rich.

This is a really confusing attitude. At any price point, you need to look at what similar houses in the area go for - so a £5 million house is a steal on a street with similar £8 million houses; as is a £300k house on a street with £500k houses.
when we came to sell our house at a similar price point our estate agent said not to bother updating the couple of rooms which were still tired (incl the kitchen) - most people want to do it themselves anyway and what’s a lovely style to you won’t be for them

We did our kitchen properly after a stop gap one for 20 years! I'm still quite excited about it. DH, aged 55, says it's the only one he will ever do.

Our Boomer parents, both stretched themselves to buy and then fitted kitchens and bathrooms from their then current income.
I do remember going to a few london houses in the 2000s and seeing amazing new professionally fitted kitchens and bathrooms at newly bought homes. The reasoning being that the 30 something couples had not overstretched to buy (memories of negative equity still around) but had added the cost of new stuff to the mortgage.
The bathrooms are still amazing in my memory!!

These days, £1m houses are commonplace in south of England. More houses at £2m+

Absolutely. Having the newest kitchen on a shitty road is no flex.

Buy quality stuff to last, and don’t redecorate every five mins. Would rather a solid bit of furniture that lasts the rest of time than the newest trend in B&Q wallpaper….

Where I live (deprived area of the north) a million would get you a 5/6 bed house. Beautifully done with a decent amount of land.

@Locationvshousevsgarden I’m in one of the situations you described. Now ex DH and I bought our house 20 years ago and completely did it up. We had 2 DCs, their Dad turned out to be a complete twat and we split up. That was 16 years ago now. My house is worth over 1 million but I have earned just about enough to support my family on one salary all these years with nothing left over for all but v minor improvements. I’d give anything to have my dream kitchen!

Everything now is 20 years old and I have no money to do anything!

I mean if you have a budget of £1m updating the bathrooms and kitchens is a relatively easy thing you can do. Changing the location is obviously impossible, very unlikely and expensive to buy an adjoining plot of land, and extending the house size or demolishing it and starting again would be more expensive than updating the bathrooms and kitchen. So it's relatively an easier change to make and so doesn't have a significant impact on the cost of houses worth £1m and over

£1m isn’t a special figure where something changes, value is a sliding scale. If a house would be worth £2m once in perfect condition, but isn’t in perfect condition, it’d list for £1.6 for example. No reason a house listed for £1m needs to be perfect?

Our house is probably worth that (4 bed, home counties). The kitchen was done in about 2006, one of the bathrooms before that. The windows are at least 30 years old & the electrics are older than that. We may move in the next few years, so the price will reflect that. We'll probably have to get a new boiler in the next year or so (current one is 25 years old) but why would we spend money on things that will date quite quickly anyway, or we don't get a return on? It's only that sort of value because of where it is, it's not a big swanky house.

Because the people who live there bought it 50 years ago for 20k. They don't have much money now and maybe are only living on a state pension. So they can't afford to do up their house.

They didn't choose for it to be worth 1m now. So they were just normal middle or working class people. They might have bought the place off the council.

Boo fucking hoo. It's not the task of sellers to make the buyers' life a breeze. You get what you are willing to pay. End of.

I've heard this ridiculous piss and moan about, and it usually is, Boomers only thinking of themselves and the hose they live in. The cheek!

Older owners is more likely.

Absolutely. My parents moved into their then new build in 1983. They changed the kitchen and bathroom once in around 2005, and, with them now in their 70's, they don't expect to have to change it again in their lifetime.

You think people should keep their house in the latest fashion so that a future owner doesn’t have to redecorate?

Good grief.

The children of said owners can sell it as a doer upper. If a house is genuinely derelict the council will sometimes take action (I’ve seen this happen relatively recently).