Is London really full of normal working people living in million pound houses?

[Morosky]

Because Heseltine seems to think there is, he just said so on Question Time.

Who is out of touch me or him?

lol at pool

more like "wonder if that secondary glazing will fall out and kill someone because they can't afford to fix it"

sorry but if anyone is living in a house worth £1million - however they managed to come by it, whether appreciation or help from parents etc - they can afford to be taxed

they could remortgage, take a loan, get a lodger or move to a cheaper house

if the average house price is £306K then any property worth £1m is well above that so why is anyone defending them? even if they are "cash poor"? hesletine is a wanker.

me and my dp and 2 dcs are crammed into a 2-bed flat because that's all we can afford but my parents live in their 3-bed terrace and we know plenty of homes in our street that are 4-5 beds occupied by 1 or 2 pensioners. it is just all so very wrong and makes me really upset...

i'm with morningpaper on inheritance tax too. we need to make things fairer.

oops - I spelt Heseltine wrong didn't I.

I'm looking on rightmove for London properties for sale at a million or more. Yes, there are some two-bed flats, but most seem to be 4+ bed detached houses, not what I'd call "average".

(But I live in a poor part of the country, inside loos are posh round here. )

mmrsceptic - outside of London, that is the kind of evaluation that will be made. There may only be handful of properties over a million in a certain area, so accurately valuing them will be difficult - and reaching an agreed valuation almost impossible, given the inevitable unpopularity of the tax amongst the people who'll have to pay it.

I really think the idea is unworkable.

I don't think pensioners could remortgage. Or afford to move, or be given a loan. And lodgers? It's up to no one to tell a pensioner to get a lodger in a house they own and have paid for and looked after out of taxed money.

Ha, me too at looking at Rightmove. Put 3 bed as max and it comes up with Chelsea

SW London (South Wimbledon) in a teeny tiny two bed maisonette with small garden downstairs £200,000

The point was made earlier on in the thread - aside from the emotional upheaval and the fact that people have a right not to be hounded out of their home - moving to a cheaper house (eg £800k) is still going to involve the best part of £40k in stamp duty and moving costs.

agree with you wonder

plus, if you move in London, you can't move to a cheaper house, generally, and what if you've got children at school, and no spare bedrooms, and house insurance that won't allow subletting, and are already mortgaged to the eyeballs

I am struggling a little with the attitude that inherited money is evil.

How can it be that for those people who have worked hard, earnt THEIR money, been taxed on THEIR money, saved THEIR money, been taxed on that money and then chosen to give what is left of THEIR money to some one other than the tax man.
I really do not understand why that is so bad?

Is it better to spend every last penny each month and then when things get tough put your hand out for the tax man to help you out????

Is it a class issue? I am lower middle class with a property we cant sell. I live in the southeast (south coast) however there are not many million pound houses near me!
I would have loved to have inhertited some money

According to this,

news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/in_depth/uk_house_prices/html/an.stm?t#table

from May, the average terraced house price in kensington and chelsea and westminister exceeds £1m, and nears it in Camden. Then it's 700k in Hammersmith & Fulham, where we've just moved from (there are no average for detached as they essentially don't exist in numbers big enough to average in central london; camden averages £3m for a detached....). So it's a very small bit of London where the average is £1m! 400k-700k covers a lot of ground though, which is far more than the average for the UK I think which is nearer £150k?

So he's talking nonsense....

This does remind me of a comedy sketch I saw ages ago in which an Eastenders charactar told everyone to cheer up because he had worked out how much their houses were worth.

I know it is not easy for older people but if I had a house worth over a million I would sell up and move somewhere with normal property prices.

Heseltine didn't actually say London was "full of ordinary people living in £1M houses" like the OP suggests. He said £1M houses in London are not mansions or Abramovich houses but ordinary terraced houses. Which is true, isn't it?

What Heseltine actually said on QT

In the process of helping a friend's daughter property-hunt in London recently, I noted my first flat would now cost around £650K. I bought it in the early 80s with a 90% mortgage and a hard-saved 10% deposit. At the time I was on a graduate trainee's salary. So it's not difficult to see how £1M could be very easily breached.... without getting anywhere near a mansion.

There is no legal obligation to record the price on Land Registry documents, most people in the know will ask their solicitor not to record the price, hence Land Registry prices are misleading

5% stamp duty on £1M plus homes has been discussed for a while. Roman Abramovich and his like pay stamp duty at the flat company rate of 0.5% because all their property assets are held by companies registered in Jersey.

Is this a mansion?

or this in Tooting?

Or this? And Muswell Hill isn't even on the tube.

It's not just Kensington and Chelsea.

Morovsky, what, and pull your children out of school and change your job? To please... who? It's not our fault prices spiralled out of control. To buy a house in the same region you're looking at the same prices. We are trapped too and if this went through we'd be punished for it.

I am not blaming anyone or casting aspersions, I am just saying that is hat I would do.

I have just moved from one end of the country to the other, although went from less to more expensive but not on a London scale.

When dd was a baby we lived in London, as soon as I became a single mother and realised I faced living in poverty I moved.

REduced looked at first 2, they are not ordinary terraced houses. I grew up in an ordinary terraced house and they were not like that.

normal terraced house in Tooting at £240K

normal terrace at 250

normal terrace at 275

Matthew Parris has an excellent article about this in the Times today and I think he puts it perfectly when he says: "Human beings really, really hate being taxed just because they own something........ We are inured to the taxation of what moves. As money flies in as income, we are inured to the State taking another cut. But we want to believe that having yielded our due as we earn and paying our due when we spend, we may at least count what we have, keep and hold as our own."

That's interesting about Land Registry prices. For what purpose would people 'in the know' be asking their solicitors to withhold the information - tax avoidance?

Are we now saying that people in £1m+ houses who routinely practise large-scale tax avoidance are just ornery folk, guv'nor? Strike a light, apples and pears etc etc

I think extremely-comfortable-bordering-on-very-wealthy types can easily become a little detached from how the vast majority of people in this country actually live.

(And Morosky's right - those are pretty opulent houses by most people's standards. I've never lived anywhere like that, and I'm not poor.)

reduced they look pretty mansion-like from the perspective of my very ordinary 3 bed with loft conversion terrace. And mine is 'grander' than probably 70% of the terraced streets around here where the front door opens into the sitting room.

Morosky - 2 beds is not a normal terraced house

Eldon, not normal for whom? Not normal for people who can pay half a million, perhaps, but for lots of us, 2 bed terraces are perfectly normal.

Rightmove is currently listing 22 2-bed terraces in Tooting 34 in Wimbledon, 40 in Walthamstow. My (non-London) home town has 65 on the market.

OK, so there are more 3 beds, but 2 is not bizarre.

Eldon so will an extra bedroom cost another £750K?

76 3 beds are listed for Tooting - prices range from 210 to 825K

I didn't say 2 beds was bizarre but it is not the norm